Pamela Murray Winters

John Jennings

2011-08-29T13:52:00.000-07:00

A friend just told me of a near-tragedy that happened to her friends during Hurricane Irene: a tree smashed through their house and fell right between the two of them in bed.

This reminded me of a story I did on John Jennings for the Washington City Paper back in 2003.

Life and Limbs
By Pamela Murray Winters • February 21, 2003

"I just got my halo off four weeks ago," John Jennings says. The 49-year-old producer and musician is referring not to some midlife bacchanal involving a cigarette boat and a toupee, but to another step in his recovery from an accident that nearly sent him to the angels almost seven months ago.

On the evening of July 28, 2002, as Jennings and his girlfriend, Tamara Meyer, returned from a movie to their home in Potomac, their car was hit by a falling 100-foot tree that had been eaten through by time and insects. "A limb, what I thought was a tree, appeared. And I heard the rustling of leaves," recalls Jennings. "And then I woke up, and there were flames coming out from under the hood of the car. And I had this really nasty pain in the back of my neck."

Laughing slightly as he tells his story, Jennings is quick to clarify: "I mean, it wasn't particularly funny then! But I've got a much better sense of humor about it now."

Meyer had managed to unbuckle Jennings' seat belt, and he stumbled to the curb. Laurie Ellard, a Montgomery County police officer who had strayed from her usual route to fill up her tank, spotted the wreckage and was able to extricate Meyer, who was trapped in the burning car with a shattered tibia.

These days, Jennings can't help thinking about the what-ifs of the accident: What if Meyer hadn't undone his belt? What if Officer Ellard hadn't come along in time to rescue Meyer? What if the trunk had fallen a few inches to the left or right? "The tree fell almost right in between us, which is amazing," he says. "I don't have pictures of the car here, but the first time I saw them I was fairly nonchalant, and the second time I saw them I wasn't. One of the cops on the scene said, 'You mean someone got out of that?'"

Despite the seriousness of his neck injury—a fracture of the second vertebra—Jennings was in Bethesda's Suburban Hospital for a mere five days. "The guidelines that they establish to let you out are fairly arbitrary," he says, careful to note that his criticism is of the insurers, not of the fine folks at Suburban. "All I had to do to be able to get out was walk up and down a flight of stairs. And I feel like I was ready to come home when they sent me, but I think there are probably a lot of people who wouldn't have been."

Jennings spent nearly six months with his head, neck, and upper body immobilized by the circular apparatus that many spinal-cord-injury patients must wear in the aftermath of their injuries. Although his Feb. 22 show at Wolf Trap is being billed as a "triumphant return," the accident didn't keep him from working, even if it slowed things down considerably. "I did two or three gigs while I was still in the halo," he says. "Not without its challenges: The guitar would rest against this shoulder-pad piece, and the sound would come right into my skull." He also produced an album for singer-songwriter Catie Curtis in December. "I couldn't turn my head," Jennings recalls. "I couldn't really put on a set of headphones." Despite the difficulties, "after a while, I wanted to get out and play—in self-defense."

A musician who kept that busy while his body was encased in metal and plaster must have spent his recovery with itchy fingers. Jennings was as careful as he needed to be to recuperate smoothly, but, he says, "I hit the ground running." Indeed, he booked the Wolf Trap gig not too long after the accident, as if to give his body a timeline: A job's coming up—be ready.

Born in Harrisonburg, Va., Jennings spent some of his youth in Luray but also several years in New Mexico, near Carlsbad Caverns. "We used to let tarantulas crawl up our arms and stuff like that," he recalls. "'Cause you don't think when you're a kid, and they're just everywhere, so what are you gonna do? You're gonna play with them." He entertained rock-star fantasies as early as sixth grade, and by his early 20s, he was playing with Bill Holland and Rent's Due, a jazz-oriented outfit headed by pianist Holland, who is now the Washington bureau chief of Billboard.

Jennings has made a living at music throughout his life: as a producer (of the Indigo Girls and BeauSoleil, among others), session musician (guitar, organ, dulcimer, bass), educational-video scorer (for Scholastic Press), and local jingle writer ("Whatever you want, think Belmont"). He's released three solo albums of his guitar-based pop-folk music, the most recent the optimistically titled It's All Good, and often backs blues-rocker Mary Ann Redmond at the Starland Cafe in Upper Northwest.

Jennings cites the three turning points of his career as meeting Holland, "who made me realize that real adults made serious pop music"; working at Springfield's Bias Recording Studios, where he "started to learn how one makes really great recordings"; and meeting Mary Chapin Carpenter. Indeed, Jennings is best known for his working relationship with Carpenter, whom he met when she was gigging at local clubs in the early '80s. He's produced and played on all of her albums, and a spontaneous Jennings remark was responsible for the title of her most recent one, Time*Sex*Love: "Time is the great gift; sex is the great equalizer; love is the great mystery."

"There are a lot of ways to make a living as a musician," Jennings muses. "You can play in clubs, you can teach, you can do jingles....You can go play in a pit band somewhere. You can play in the symphony if you're good enough." But he notes that in a town that's not recognized as a music center, "it's very, very difficult...to judge what's really good. Because if you can get 30 or 40 people to come see you play once a week, you've got a gig. So if you can call 30 or 40 of your friends and get them to come out, you can play....And I don't think that indicates a lot.

"I remember when we first started out working with Chapin," he continues. "When she first got signed, and we first started touring, we would go in places and play for like 15 to 20 people. Everybody does it. And it took years of doing this religiously for things to kind of catch on. And it also took a lot of good luck and a label that started to understand what she did and figured out how they could maximize what they had."

Jennings says that making it in the music industry is "arbitrary"—circling back, he compares the criteria for success to the standards insurance companies set for sending the sick and injured home from the hospital. "I wish that I could tell you what it takes to succeed in the music business," he says. "I can tell you what it takes to succeed on a smaller level—that's pretty easy: It just takes making more money than you spend."

Did he ever have a vision about where his career should go? "Never," he says firmly. "I'm really bad at that. I think if you find it necessary, then it's necessary. For some people, that's exactly what they need. And some people are really good at setting goals and achieving them. It's never worked for me particularly well. Because it's a process. To me, that's the great thing about being—and I use this term very guardedly—an artist. Because to me, it's pretty much about the process, the actual doing of it."

Viewed in these terms, Jennings' is a success story: He's doing what he loves and getting paid for it. When asked whether he's ever wanted a bigger share of the limelight, he says he's comfortable where he is: "I get enough shots to be out in front that I'm relatively content. The only thing that could persuade me to be more of a frontman would be huge piles of cash. But other than that, I'm pretty happy."

Even the D.C. area's recent batch of nasty winter weather hasn't dampened his spirit: Jennings' was the first car to leave his neighborhood after last weekend's record snowfall, taking him back to his Charlottesville, Va., studio to work on various projects. He's especially looking forward to doing more writing, although he says he hasn't yet written a song about the accident.

"It would be a very short song," he jokes, "and probably consist entirely of the lyrics 'I'm so lucky.'" —Pamela Murray Winters

John Jennings and Friends perform at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22, at the Barns of Wolf Trap, 1645 Trap Road, Vienna. For more information, call (703) 255-1860.

Afternoon Delight...

2011-02-08T12:31:00.000-08:00

Mellow Gold
By Pamela Murray Winters
Washington City Paper, July 2, 2004

DJ Libby is by far the liveliest person at the laid-back Starland Cafe on a recent Saturday evening, peppering the crowd with Will Ferrell trivia and otherwise trying to drum up interest in the actor’s upcoming film, Anchorman. It’s “’70s Anchorman Open Mic Night,” but the contest honors one song in particular.

“They don’t have to do ‘Afternoon Delight’!” scoffs Starland Cafe co-owner Bill Danoff, sotto voce. Informed that only renditions of “Delight” are eligible for the grand prize—a box of Anchorman swag—he’s slightly agitated: “Oh, God, I don’t want to hear a billion versions of that!”

Few people have heard “Delight” as often as Danoff—he’s its composer. Danoff penned the cheeky soft-rock song nearly 30 years ago, inspired by a menu item at Clyde’s of Georgetown. Released on the debut album of the Starland Vocal Band—a D.C.-based foursome also featuring Jon Carroll, Margot Chapman, and Danoff’s then-wife, Taffy Danoff—“Delight” was an instant hit, and only hit, for the band, which also won a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1976. Danoff also wrote John Denver’s hit “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and has remained in the music business as well as helming the popular Palisades restaurant with his current wife, Joan Danoff.

Danoff opens the performances with the newest possible sort of retro song, singing“I’m Gonna Miss the Cicadas” with daughter Lucy Danoff on backing vocals. And he gets his wish: Only one group of contestants sings “Afternoon Delight.” Side by Side, with Sean McGhee and Doris Justis, wins the prize package by default with a faithful, guitar-accompanied version of the song. The duo also offers a cover of John Denver’s “Fly Away,” a syrupy elixir that makes “Delight” seem like straight scotch by comparison.

Other performers return to the Dacron Decade with songs by Jackson Browne and Cat Stevens. A musician who calls himself “T.M.” pairs the melody of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” with the lyrics to “Pinball Wizard,” accompanying his best Man in Black growl with the sound of a brand-new mandola. “I usually do it on the mandolin with a wah-wah pedal,” he says later. Finally, Danoff brings a dozen folks onstage—including ex-wife, daughter, and surprise guest Jon Carroll—for a gang rendition of “Delight.”

When the promotional tchotchkes have been put away and the PR folks are gone, Carroll, who, like three of the four Starlanders, still lives in the Washington area (Chapman is in New Mexico), hangs around at the bar, quaffing a nonalcoholic St. Pauli Girl and musing on his life. His career has been about a lot more than skyrockets in flight and rubbing sticks and stones together; he’s currently on a break from touring as Mary Chapin Carpenter’s keyboardist, and he’s active in music and theater both locally and nationally.

But the Starland fame still flickers. “It’s the ironic reality distilled from Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame,” he says. “It’s more like eight-and-a-half. And you’re splitting it with Jefferson Starship.” —Pamela Murray Winters

Hank Dogs (Dirty Linen)

2006-08-27T10:32:00.001-07:00

Just now, trying to find out whatever happened to these folks, I found someone else's Blogger.com blog that mentions them: http://weirdcircle.blogspot.com/2005/10/hank-dogs.html

Supposedly they have a Web page at www.hankdogs.co.uk, but I couldn't get it to come up.

From Dirty Linen #86 (Feb/Mar 2000).

Hank Dogs

Deeper Than a Hat

by Pamela Murray Winters

In a smoky American bar, under strings of old license plates from the 50 states, I’m talking to a man in a Stetson. The subject is Joe Boyd of Hannibal Records and his prowess for finding talented and innovative musicians: the likes of Maria Muldaur, 10,000 Maniacs, and now this man’s band, Hank Dogs.

To the remark “Joe Boyd is really batting a thousand,” the Stetson tips up to reveal a startled face. “What does that mean?” Andy asks crisply. “That’s an Americanism.”

“Americanism” is not a foreign concept to Andy, nor to his companions in London's Hank Dogs, Lily and Piano. (They prefer not to use their last names.) Offstage, they listen to Steve Earle, John Hiatt, and Nanci Griffith.

Onstage, and on the superb debut album Bareback (released by Hannibal in early 1999), the trio blends the sounds of its homeland with those of American roots musicians and a generous infusion of imagination. As the band finishes its second album, it seems clear that Hank Dogs’ status as citizens of their own peculiar and magical world will not change. They can't claim loyalty to a single heritage.

“The Englishness comes from my guitar playing,” said Andy. “It’s not exactly blues, and it’s not exactly Celtic. I learned to play guitar on a six-string. I was listening to John Fahey and John Renbourn.

“Maybe 10 years ago, I suddenly got struck by all this new country music,” Andy continued. Steve Earle is a perennial favorite. (The Dogs also admire his sister Stacey, and on this recent U.S. tour they regretted that they kept just missing her; in Arlington, Virginia, she was playing the night after them.) In alt-country music, Andy and friends found a kinship. “They weren’t entirely accepted by Nashville. That’s how we felt. We weren’t accepted by the folk establishment [in the U.K.]. We didn’t feel like a folk band. And they don’t feel like country bands. They just play the songs the way they like to hear them,” Andy explained.

Piano was quick to point out that “folk music” isn’t a slur. “We don’t have anything against it. We just haven’t really crossed paths with it.” Hank Dogs (the name is an homage to Hank Williams, as well as a tribute to Andy and Piano’s late Labrador retriever) handled its maverick status in a sensible way: Andy and Piano started their own club. The Easycome Acoustic Club in South London features “English acoustic indie” music.

One of Easycome’s inspirations was the club where Hank Dogs was born in the late 80s. At London’s legendary Troubadour, the late-night come-all-ye’s provided on-the-job training. “It’s like an open mike night, but without the mike,” said Andy. “You’d wait all night to play one song, and you’d be terrified, but you’d really learn the art of going up on stage.”

“The standard of people playing [at the Troubadour] was so high, it made you think you’ve gotta be that good,” Piano said.

This experience was crucial for the shy Piano, who had been “terrified to get out and do it. You have to get over that,” she said. “Get out there and do it.” She first faced a Troubadour audience, alone, about 9 years ago. “It was awful, but it was a start.” But it took years for her to conquer her stage fright, her sense of “what could people possibly be interested in here? I’ve got nothing!”

Andy played rock guitar for a time, including a brief stint in a late incarnation of the Sex Pistols. “I stopped when I met Piano, because Piano was just learning guitar and thinking about writing songs. She really brought me back into music. Lily [Andy’s daughter] was only, like, 10 when we started.

“So you hadn’t done any gigs yet, right?” Andy teased his daughter, who was too busy with a pre-show meal to offer a reply. “At school you had. You used to sing in the choir.” He recalled Lily singing the Suzanne Vega song “Tom’s Diner,” unaccompanied, at a school assembly.

Lily and Piano were both drawn to the poetic lyrics and natural phrasing of artists like Vega. Piano cited the simplicity of Vega’s delivery: “It’s not that warbling country vibrato. It’s like speaking to a tune.” Piano also lists Maura O’Connell, Tracy Chapman, the Bangles, and Sinead O’Connor as favorites.

“Lily and I started singing together, not thinking it was going to go anywhere, just because we liked the same sort of music,” said Piano. “Andy and I were living in the same house. I was trying to impress him. It worked!” she laughed.

“I’m more impressed every day,” Andy said staunchly. Critics are impressed as well; Time Out London said, “This is deft acoustic music with a rare soulful ache and a powerful twisted beauty.”

Most gratifyingly, this seductive, atmospheric music, rooted in the organically twining harmonies of Lily and Piano, is finding its audience. Hank Dogs opened for Joan Baez on a U.S. tour last year and later toured the States as a headliner. “We didn’t know up until that point that we actually had a following in America. In certain areas loads of people turned up to see us,” said Piano.

Andy added, “It’s a good feeling to be three thousand, five thousand miles away from where you live and to find that people have been buying your record and listening to it.”

They credit their record company and their agent for getting their music to the right ears, but they also acknowledge the unknown. “We’ve been incredibly lucky in our careers, certain things falling into place,” said Andy. “We’ve never really pushed it; we’ve just let it happen in a natural way. Piano has a philosophy that you don’t make mistakes in life; everything happens for a reason. You have to have faith.”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t have to work,” Piano added.

As they travel the American road making their music, Andy likes to muse on the Western legend. “I’m fond of cowboys, that whole idea of the outdoors, the outdoor life. I never knew how Americans would react to that.” He pondered possible rejection: “What are these upstarts doing — they’re English!” But the authenticity of the band’s vision has largely won out.

To doubters, the definitive word comes from Lily. “People might think the hat is an image thing,” she grinned as she looked at her dad’s Stetson. “But he used to pick me up from school with that on!”

Morris dance (Dirty Linen, 1996)

2006-08-27T08:35:00.001-07:00

I've just been reading Colin Irwin's excellent book In Search of Albion, about British customs. Is there a word for the sort of nostalgia one feels for something one never had? Because that's the way I feel about so much of English and Scottish tradition.

This story was submitted with a whole lot of quotes as section dividers. The layout changed the presentation of them; some were just sort of floating in the article. I've tried to put them in their proper places, but here are two orphaned ones:

In the Morris-dance proper we have a dance of grace and dignity, instinct with emotion gravely restrained in a manner not unsuggestive of its older significance, full of complex co-ordinated rhythms of hand and foot.

--Cecil Sharp and Herbert C. McIlwaine, The Morris Book, 1912

Morris dancing is one of the Great English Mysteries, like cricket and warm beer.

--Rosemary Edghill, mystery writer, in Book of Moons, 1995

For more on the Bristol Morris Men, see http://www.bristolmorrismen.co.uk/.

From Dirty Linen #64, June/July '96.

The Merry Mighty Morris

by Pamela Murray Winters

In the village of Long Ashton, on the edge of Bristol, England, Paul Woods lives among green fields where cows lean over the fence to sniff at the pineapple sage bushes in his garden. He and his wife, Sandra, share their home with a number of small animals, some living and some ceramic. The ceramic ones, collected on his travels, parade across his mantel. All of them play melodeons, a testament to their owner’s love of music.

Most work days, Woods instructs other University of Bristol librarians in the mysteries of CD-ROM technology, the internet, and other modern practices. He is never at work on May Day. Instead, he rises at 4:50 a.m., dons the garb of his brotherhood, and ties straps of jingle bells around his calves. And precisely at daybreak, he and the other members of the Bristol Morris Men greet the sun and the summer with the peculiar steps and turns of a half-dozen centuries.

Great Britain has well over 500 morris teams, or sides, with perhaps 5,000 to 7,500 dancers, according to Tom Keays, creator of the frequently asked questions file (FAQ) for an Internet group of the ancient art. The latest edition of the American Morris Newsletter directory lists about 150 sides in the United States and Canada. Co-editor Allen Dodson said “that translates into 1,500 to 2,000 people, since many people dance with more than one of these teams.”

A morris dance is not a sock hop, though there is revelry. It is not a ballet, though it includes carefully choreographed feats of nerve and grace. It is not a square dance, though the dancers form figures and move to lively music. A morris side contains some or all of the following: (1) between six and 12 identically dressed dancers, usually of the same gender; (2) a fool, who may be dressed like the other dancers but who is distinguished by being, well, foolish; (3) other characters of the sort found in folk plays — a horse, a king, a queen (often all portrayed by men); (4) many wonderful noisemakers: drums, concertinas, fiddles, and those bells; (5) handkerchiefs, ribbons, and garlands. Mix well, add a little magic and a lot of beer, and you have morris, or a mess.

The kicks and hops, the waving of white handkerchiefs and bashing of sticks, and the varying tempos of the music baffle and amaze first-time viewers. The handkerchiefs and sticks are said to be artifacts of swordplay. And the bells? They’re to scare off evil spirits, as legend has it.

The fool, the odd card among the matched dancers, keeps the audience from getting in the way; in addition, the fool reminds the audience, usually not subtly, that it’s all right to enjoy themselves.

Antony Gay, the Bristol Morris fool, stirred up trouble at a dance weekend a few years back, recalled Woods. “Kemp’s Men of Norwich did a version of the Fieldtown stick dance ‘Balance the Straw,’ which they embellished by tossing the sticks to each other across the set and catching them. They were so intent on watching their own synchronized stick throwing that they failed to notice Antony tossing an extra stick into the middle of the set. They all thought, ‘Oh, God, I’ve missed catching the stick’ and went for it simultaneously, causing all the sticks to be dropped. They still didn’t realize what had happened until they counted the sticks afterwards.”

Who was this Morris fellow anyway? Many theories about “morris” draw a connection between the blackface some dancers (such as Shropshire Bedlams) wear and the notion that the dance is “Moorish.” Elaine Bradtke, a dancer, ethnographer, and wearer of more hats than your average morris side, says morris may come from a court dance “representing the Christians’ defeat of the Moors,” although it’s certainly changed in the intervening centuries. (Theories that the dance steps derived from the frustrated attempts of a group of jazz age Cambridge students to beat a Morris Mini into life are probably a bit farther from the truth.)

The Bristol Morris Men, founded in 1951, practice Cotswold morris, the best-known variety. (Others include Northeast sword dances and Border dances, out of which the Shropshire Bedlams evolved.) As the group’s squire, Woods is responsible for deciding which dances the group will do. “We have created many of our own dances within the styles of [various village] traditions. It really is a living tradition in this way.”

Some traditionalists would prefer that dancers like Woods be less creative with what they see as a British treasure as solid and enigmatic as Stonehenge. Both credit and blame have been laid at the non-dancing feet of folklorist Cecil Sharp: credit for reviving a near-dead art, blame for keeping the steps, dress, and music in a rigidity at odds with the wit and energy of the dancers themselves. While Sharp’s English Folk Dance Society demonstration side kept order, renegade dancers like the Ilmington side (called “uncouth and untraditional” by Sharp) and fiddler and solo broom dancer Samuel Bennett added new dimensions to the tradition in the earlier part of this century.

Written references to the dance date back to at least the 15th century. Morris shares certain elements of fertility and harvest rituals: animal sacrifice is suggested in some processions by a cake carried impaled on a sword; plays (like mummers’ plays) contain seemingly emblematic characters like shepherds, doctors, and royalty; and women, particularly brides, are sometimes passed around by the dancers in what seems to be either a fertility rite or (Woods implied) an excuse to handle strange women.

All over England our town and village communities have developed strange traditions...In most cases the communities have forgotten the original reason for continuing the custom. It is enough that the custom must be observed.

--The Morris Tradition, booklet, from the Morris Ring (1991)

No one is sure why the arcane customs of morris persist. In a 1989 interview with Colin Irwin of Folk Roots, musician and Shropshire Bedlams morris man John Kirkpatrick claimed that little evidence exists for the pagan-ritual origins often ascribed to the dance: “Morris appeals to a very primitive part of people which is difficult to express; and when you have this powerful energy going on, it’s easier to give it some ancient origin rather than admit that it’s part of you inside that’s uncivilized.”

Clearly, Paul Woods has found his inner morris man. At any given moment this mild librarian can become an agile dancer, a forceful caller, a persuasive educator, or an incorrigible punster — or several of the above. Asked by a BBC radio interviewer to describe a fellow dancer’s morris wear, he offered: “He’s wearing black britches, white socks, white shirt. He’s got a very colorful hat on. He’s got baldrics [sashes crossed over the chest] with a seal of Bristol in the middle. This was from the days before ecology went wrong — you used to get seals in Bristol.”

Woods says morris was developed by traveling farm laborers who, finding themselves short of work and in need of funds and entertainment, repeated a mix of ritual motions and passed the hat afterwards. However it evolved, it persisted, handed down in families and villages, until the end of the 19th century. By the beginning of this century, urban growth had emptied many village sides. War carried off many morris men: “Between 80 and 90% of the male population of the Cotswold morris village Ascott under Wychwood failed to return from World War I,” said Woods. The tradition would have vanished if Cecil Sharp had not traveled from village to village, seeking the surviving members of the local sides. Watching the old men patiently repeat the morris steps and play the old airs, Sharp noted, in detail, what he saw; in turn, his readers reclaimed the customs.

Morris is still a mystery to many Americans, but in England it’s a source of strong feeling, from local pride to broad derision. Among dancers, controversies rage; some charge the Morris Ring, founded in 1934, with inflexibility and a tendency to promote “wimpy” dancing, while conservative types are more likely to complain about mismatching tunes and dances or allowing women or mixed-gender teams.

I showed Woods a passage from World Music: The Rough Guide which begins: “Morris dancing is at the very heart of clichéd English imagery,” and goes on to sneer at hanky-waving, bell-jingling eccentrics. According to Woods, “some namby-pamby morris you see around” has given morris a reputation for silliness that doesn’t tell the whole story. Kirkpatrick has called morris “sexy,” and those who have seen it done well will agree.

Come you young me, come along

With your music, dance and song

--”Staines Morris,” traditional morris song, from the album Morris On, 1972

“I’m not a natural dancer, by any means,” said Woods, a robust, red-bearded fellow whose appearance does not suggest Mikhail Baryshnikov. But when he was in his late 20s, a visit to the Bath Festival changed his life.

In the 1960s, the English folk revival sent young musicians out of the clubs and into the study rooms of the Cecil Sharp House in London in search of inspiration from the old ways. One such group, the Albion Country Band, had its own morris side. Around 1974, Woods, who grew up on the Ronettes, Bob Dylan, and Jefferson Airplane and had recently discovered British folk-rock, saw Albion Morris at Bath and was “knocked out,” he remembered. “How could anyone dance so skillfully and with such obvious enjoyment?”

Despite his love of the morris music, Woods was reluctant to dance: “It never occurred to me that I could do anything like that — me, Mr. Inepto!” He first attended festival workshops with “the master” Roy Dommett. Then, overcoming his shyness, he approached the Bristol Morris Men and asked to join. Over the two decades since, he has strained legs, back, and elbows and bruised his knuckles, though he hasn’t broken any bones. He has studied dancers from across the country (“always on the lookout for a good dance, figure, or tune to nick”) and has traveled all over Europe, collecting those ceramic animals and teaching dance. He has become one of the most experienced members of the hometown side he was almost too timid to join.

Naturally soft-spoken and introspective, he now calls all of Bristol’s dances in a booming baritone and has done numerous BBC interviews. He’s even danced on the radio.

Morris dance “transformed my personality,” said Woods, then qualified: “Mind you, it’s the uniform shielding me.”

They always say that morris is a ritual dance. I think sometimes it's an excuse for a good piss-up, really.

--Woods, BBC interview, 1982

A lusty, macho, ale-soaked mystique pervades many morris sides. Each week’s Bristol Morris practice concludes with an hour in the local pub. The exploits of Woods’ cohorts upon the occasion of his wedding cannot be recounted in a family publication. “Bristol Morris Men stag nights are...” Woods paused to think. “Different.”

There are now male and female sides, and mixed sides of both sexes, in Britain and the United States. “Many of the older clubs are still violently against women dancing,” said Woods. “We’re not, though most of us dislike mixed Cotswold morris on purely aesthetic reasons. It rarely looks good, whereas single-sex teams can get an energy and unity of purpose which look great.”

Bradtke, who dances and/or fiddles with three teams in the New Jersey area, noted: “In some ways [morris] is a ‘manly pursuit’— and like other manly deeds such as shoveling snow or changing a tire, a woman can do it as well if she puts her mind to it...To do the dance properly, one should be able to leap and caper about with wild abandon (in time to the music, of course). Because morris dancing doesn’t require a great deal of upper body strength, women are quite capable of doing the dance properly.”

The Bristol Morris Men perform at “weddings, circumcision ceremonies, parties, anything,” says Woods, but May Day is the pinnacle of the morris year. Although morris dancing wasn’t originally done on May Day but rather on Whitsunday, a movable spring holiday, the better-known holiday has become associated with morris. Teams start early in the morning and traverse their cities the rest of the day, dancing at pubs, churches, and shopping centers. Woods’ side once performed 104 dances on a single May Day.

Why go to so much work when pranks and beer can be had for so much less? Allen Dodson grows philosophical: “The world at large doesn’t understand or do morris, and that’s okay. The world at large is preoccupied with competition, making money, and gauging the worth of things by their popularity or money-making potential. Morris is anathema to all that...There’s a lot of joy in the morris — in the sounds of the bells, in the color of the kit, in the waving hankies — that is really beautiful.”

Q. What's the hardest part of dancing for you?

A. My body wearing out, being too fat, and not being able to dance as well as I used to when younger.”

--Woods, January 1995

On May Day 1995, just before lunch, Woods was dancing when he noticed that something wasn’t quite right with his foot. He massaged it during lunch, but upon resuming the dance “I heard a sort of slapping sound, and it felt like someone had hit the sole of my heel with a stick. They hadn’t, though. I crumpled.” Ever loyal, Woods didn’t shorten his May Day: “I carried on the tour, non-dancing, going to one more school, a sports center for a sauna, a pub, a curry, a long interview on cable TV, a paid booking at a hotel, and a pub... Then when I got home I asked my wife to take me to the hospital.”

The stress fracture kept Woods from dancing for two months; he did limited dancing through the summer until October, when the condition worsened. Weight loss and painkillers are keeping him on his feet, but he’s not sure when (as he might say) the jig will be up.

Said Bradtke, who had an ankle rebuilt to continue dancing, “Some [older dancers] take up less strenuous forms of dance; some take up a musical instrument. Some keep dancing ‘til they keel over dead... I heard of one old gent in England who was in his 80s and still teaching the new guys on the team. He had two hips replaced and before the surgery he would support himself by leaning on a table while showing the stepping!”

“Bristol Morris Men are all getting older together,” Woods — who’s only half the age of Bradtke’s “old gent” — mused. “The nucleus of the side hasn’t changed greatly in 20 years. And soon the others will start to get the joint aches like me. It’ll be much harder for me to come along and not dance.” Still, he said, “Shouting is important too, and I think I do that quite well.”

Woods declared (not shouting) that he wishes to be buried in his morris kit, with the Bristol Men dancing at the funeral, and he’s chosen the dance: “Maybe ‘Getting up the Stairs’ (Ascott)?”

There was an old woman tossed up in a blanket

Ninety-nine miles beyond the moon

And under one arm she carried a basket

And under t’other she carried a broom

“Old woman, old woman, old woman,” cried I,

“O whither, o whither, o whither so high?”

“I’ve gone to chase cobwebs beyond the sky

And I’ll be back with you by and by.”

--Morris On

It was past midnight on a summer night, and the librarian from Long Ashton was in a pastoral town much like his own, only this one was 20 miles west of Philadelphia. The occasion was the 40th birthday of an American friend. Woods had corresponded with Charlie, who is not a morris man, for over a year via the internet. Three days earlier they’d finally met face to face.

Now Woods was in Charlie’s living room, limbered by American friendship and British gin.

Thumbing through the CDs, he came to an old favorite, Morris On. “Play ‘Princess Royal’,” he commanded. He moved to a clear spot in the dining room. Charlie set his CD player, and the music, a mid-tempo jig, began. After a moment, Woods began to hop and tilt and kick and fly in a most surprising manner. He could be called a bearlike man, but his is not a lumbering grace. He moved as if gravity were some droll American fad he had every right to ignore. His arms and legs and trunk and head seemed to create the notes as they moved. He looked up, red-bearded and red-faced. “Of course, you have to imagine the bells,” he said. But he didn’t need bells.

A Mini-Morris Bag O’Discs

Morris music is “lively, bouncy jig tunes, reels, hornpipes, mostly all very articulated and rhythmic,” according to fiddler Elaine Bradtke. “We tend to accent the upbeats a lot. The tunes are often in the key of G, sometimes modal and very beautiful, sometimes major and kind of dippy.”

“I came into the dance through liking the music,” said Paul Woods, who does not play an instrument. “The dance gives it an extra dimension. But I always get a kick when I hear a morris tune out of context, such as when Martin Carthy plays one on guitar.”

Jennifer Cutting, best known as the arranger, composer, keyboardist, and squeezebox player for The New St. George, recalled that when she joined New Esperance Morris Women in Islington, North London, the musicians were required to have dance experience so that the rhythms became ingrained. (Coming from the Ilmington side in Britain, Cutting had no trouble fulfilling this requirement.) Bradtke concurred: “It’s very important the musician know how the tune should feel to the dancers. There’s a common adage among dancers that the music will tell you what to do.”

Traditionally, morris tunes were played on a small wooden pipe (or “whittle”) and a shallow drum called a tabor (or “dub”). In the 19th century, many dancers resisted the the growing use of the fiddle and concertina for accompaniment, according to Sharp, but now both are often seen in morris bands.

Asked for favorite morris tunes, Cutting cites one from the Sherborne tradition, “The Orange in Bloom,” which The New St. George played in the pre-High Tea era. “I love it because the melody is so regal and stately.” Bradtke likes ones she doesn’t get to play often: “The Fieldtown version of ‘Shepherd’s Hey,’ ‘Staines Morris,’ and the minor version of ‘Princess Royal’.” Woods said, “Most of the tunes used by the Bampton dancers are brilliant, so infectious, so full of movement. I like particularly ‘The Quaker,’ to which we do an Oddington-style dance called ‘The Quinton.’ I knew I wanted to perform a dance to that tune one day when I first heard it.”

Listeners with one or more left feet may enjoy the following selections:

Morris On [Carthage CDCD 4406] and Son of Morris On [EMI CZ 535]: This rowdy pair of Ashley Hutchings projects “was especially influential during the 1970s,” said Bradtke. Although some dancers find the tunes too fast for dancing, they’re great for listening. I discovered morris music as a result of buying Morris On in my quest to own every sound Richard Thompson’s guitar ever made; he’s especially fine on “Cuckoo’s Nest.”

John Kirkpatrick’s many recordings, especially Plain Capers [Topic TSCD 458] and Sheepskins [Squeezer SQ125]: Perhaps Britain’s most famous morris man, Kirkpatrick proves that dancers make the best morris musicians.

Ashley Hutchings, The Compleat Dancing Master [Island HELP 17] and Rattlebone and Ploughjack [Island HELP 24]: The former, the morris Internet list FAQ points out, is not really morris; but its arrangement of dance tunes interspersed with quotes about dancing is great morris mood listening. The latter album is out of print, but Allen Dodson of the American Morris Newsletter thinks rerelease by Hannibal is imminent and recommends it for its morris field recordings.

The Old Swan Band, Gamesters, Pickpockets and Harlots has “some fine and unusual morris tunes,” said Dodson. “The same can be said for English Melodeon Players, which has three or four morris tracks.”

Over the Water [from Cottey Light Industries, 1710 Owensville Road, Charlottesville, VA 22901; 1-800-225-6409] is useful “for a feel of the American morris scene,” said Dodson.

— Pamela Murray Winters

Paul and Storm, Opening Band

2006-08-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

I set the bar high for "funny music." Paul and Storm (whom some of you--I mean, if anyone's actually reading this stuff!--might know as one half of Da Vinci's Notebook) make funny music, no question. I just re-listened to their wonderful fake commercial for Pillsbury cookie dough...it's on this album, and more of their work can be found at www.paulandstorm.com.

This little piece is from a Washington City Paper feature called "One-Track Mind," which covers new releases by D.C.-area musicians.

Published Nov. 18, 2005.

Opening Band

Paul and Storm

Standout Track: No. 5, “Epithets,” an educational number— “An epithet’s a word or phrase that people can use/When ordinary words and phrases simply won’t do”—that would be rendered even more so without the 28 bleeps effacing much of its verbiage. The third verse goes local: After “the mayor” discovers that his hooker friend was “working undercover/Then Hizzoner started utterin’/Epithets!” Cue Greg “Storm” DiCostanzo’s spoken part: “Bleepdamn bleep set me up! Bleep bullbleep this is bleep bleep bleep…”

Inspiration: “Epithets,” says DiCostanzo, stemmed from “our love of Schoolhouse Rock. Paul [Sabourin] had wanted to do something like ‘Interjections.’ We blatantly ripped it off, but they were ripping off Handel anyway.”

Actually, “Epithets” is like Handel’s “Hallelujah,” reimagined by whoever wrote the zippy old Maine-to-Mexico Texaco jingle—and embellished with DiCostanzo’s creative “scatting.” “I would never say some of those things,” the Arlington-based singer protests. “But I’m still proud in that playing-a-character kind of way.” DiCostanzo praises sound engineer Alan Johnson for his bleeps: “Comedy is about timing.… He leaves in little tiny shards of [the] words.”

Technical Constraints: For live performances, the studio bleeper is replaced by a buzzer from the game Taboo. “We don’t really curse in concert—that could be dangerous,” admits DiCostanzo. “But I’m feeling it. And my lips are doing it.”—Pamela Murray Winters

Bold Girls, Becoming George

2006-08-27T07:57:00.000-07:00

From the Washington City Paper, May 5, 2006.

Laugh During Wartime

By Pamela Murray Winters

Bold Girls

Written by Rona Munro

Directed by Mark A. Rhea

Produced by the Keegan Theatre

At Gunston Theater II to May 13; at Church Street Theater, May 18 to June 11

Becoming George

Book and lyrics by Patti McKenny and Doug Frew

Music by Linda Eisenstein

Directed by Brett Smock

At MetroStage to May 28

Having forsaken my hearth three times in the past eight days to witness tales of other women protecting theirs, I can attest that the goddess Hestia is alive and well and casting her magic feather duster over us. In A Bright Room Called Day, Tony Kushner’s protagonist gives up her career, her loved ones, and possibly even her soul in defense of her Berlin flat. When the lights come up on the Keegan Theatre’s Bold Girls, we see another homey, almost aggressively normal family room. But this one is cluttered, full of the colorful detritus that follows in the wake of children. And it occupies only one-third of the stage: To its right are a chain-link fence, anti-IRA graffiti, a destroyed car, and a road that, more often than not, is blocked.

Sound designer Tony Angelini helps set the scene, even before the lights, with explosions, sirens, and a cacophony of newscasters announcing the latest deaths and maimings. The people onstage yell a lot as well: When Marie (Ghillian Porter) is too busy to discipline her son for buying an illicit sweet, her best friend Cassie (Helen Pafumi) is only too happy to bellow at the kid about what happens to people who eat raspberry ice cream: “Their intestines get eaten away.”

So Belfast circa 1990 isn’t all that different from the gothic South of Flannery O’Connor. In Belfast, though, the violent do bear it away. Marie’s husband has been killed by British soldiers. Her brother and Cassie’s brother and husband are in prison. Marie, Cassie, and Cassie’s mother, Nora (Linda High), along with the younger women’s children, have been left to form a family unit, which convenes in Marie’s home. They seem happy to bicker and reminisce, fold laundry and make tea, and think about the future—provided the future doesn’t go beyond their next trip to the social club.

Rona Munro’s script has many light moments, and those set against the dark backdrop of civil unrest are especially striking, as when the women, dolled up for their night out, fidget their way through the latest of many obligatory minutes of silence for a war victim. A cheery outlook keeps them going: When Nora talks about an assault by the goon squad, she declares, “Oh God, that was a terrible night”—all the while laughing. And when one of them begins to sink, the others buoy her.

The conflict amid what might otherwise be merely a series of vignettes is a mysterious girl who’s been following Marie around. She’s also seen Cassie in a car with a man, doing things a married woman ought not to do. She looks familiar to Marie, who soon invites her in. Ultimately, she brings an end to both Cassie’s dream of escape and Marie’s veneration of her perfect marriage. She dresses in white, but it’s a dirty, torn white. She’s a beautiful waif who talks of a knife as “a wee bit of hard truth you can hold in your hand and point where you like.” Her name is that of a figure from Celtic legend, Deirdre, and it means “dangerous one.”

Deirdre is played by Carolyn Agan, in her professional debut. She’s a physical actor, wearing this role down to her bones. If her line delivery is less remarkable, it’s only because Munro’s script leaves the character dangling for much too long: We’re not sure, at first, whether she’s even really there or whether Marie has seen a ghost. The script’s tone, and that of Mark A. Rhea’s production, is accordingly shifty: from magical realism to realism to something perilously close to kitchen-sink melodrama. It takes until very late in the game for us to see why Deirdre is so slippery and why Cassie is so moody.

But the actors make up for any such deficiencies. Pafumi brings to Cassie a lanky, pouty-lipped sexiness: You can see why the meek Marie would pair up with her. High is solidly believable as the feisty Nora. And Porter is charming, geeky, maternal, and, ultimately, heartbreaking as Marie’s heart is broken. She seems to be someone who will endure, picking up stuffed animals, dishing out stew to the neighbors, and feeding the birds, no matter how many times her rose-colored glasses are ground underfoot. That she, unlike Nora, will never laugh at her own sad stories is why Bold Girls is both poignant and powerful.

Whether Munro’s characters deserve the title “bold girls,” it’s certainly an accurate moniker for another woman on the boards of local stages: George Sand. To hear Becoming George tell it, this semi-cross-dressing literata saved Sarah Bernhardt’s career, women’s below-the-waist couture, and the republic of France—and in MetroStage’s production, all in under three hours.

Yes, it’s a musical, and one shouldn’t look to musicals for history. Honestly, most of the time one shouldn’t look to them for plot—it’s about the music. And if you enjoy a well-written libretto exquisitely performed, Becoming George is a must. Making its world premiere, George offers the sort of strong songs associated with the best of mid-20th-century musical theater, from the rousing “Where’s the Fire?” to the country-dance-like folktale “Black Valley Dragon” to the sentimental closer “Leave Green.” They’re demanding melodies, and the MetroStage cast, all six of them, is up to the task, as is the six-person orchestra. A small ensemble makes sense for the story of one woman’s struggle to shape not only her way of life but also the ability of others to shape their own.

The traditions of hero and heroine, ingénue and juvenile, and comic-relief oldsters are upended here. Sand (Kat’ Taylor) has a lover, Gérard (Jason Hentrich), but he’s more of a plot device than a hero. (In fact, he’s more of a heroine, in the traditional model, since he’s ultimately in need of rescuing.) And although Bernhardt (Meegan Midkiff, she of the astoundingly big voice) and the Prince (Brian Childers) flirt charmingly in “How to Dance With a Prince,” their twosome is soon sacrificed to bigger things.

Sand, nearing the end of her life, simply wants to live simply, with Gérard and her servant, Marthe (Mary Jayne Raleigh), in her country house in France. She’s already an icon of freedom and equality, not to mention a workhorse writer. Her theatrical adaptation of Faust, which was never produced, seems to have been a rare dud, at least in the production we see in rehearsal here, with Alexandre Dumas fils (Greg Violand) at the helm. He wants Bernhardt to swoon and simper instead of opening up the whoopass on the devil, as Sand and, ultimately, Bernhardt would prefer. They journey to Sand’s estate for a working vacation; then the Franco-Prussian War gets declared, and the script’s attention shifts from justice for women to justice for everyone.

The ending is simplistic and silly, so the triumph of the last rousing number, “Cri de Coeur,” isn’t firmly earned. But gosh, is it a nice-looking revolution, from Jen Price’s efficient yet evocative set design to Howard Kurtz’s lavish costumes. Sounds nice, too, especially when the three women sing sister-perfect harmony on songs like “Go Where the Girls Can’t Go.” Michael Flohr keeps the music at the right level: It’s not trying to mimic the sound of a pit orchestra and a cast of dozens. If the blocking is sometimes a bit dodgy—so much bustling around—it’ll probably get streamlined over time.

Best of all is the chance to spend time with Taylor’s Sand, a mature woman who’s neither daffy nor doddering, who swaggers and smokes cigars (pungent ones, be warned) but is never a mere drag king. Taylor’s contralto perfectly matches Sand’s maternal warmth and subversive wit. “My heart goes out,” she says, more than once, “to anything dawning or growing.” What better way to grow old, this feminist-friendly production affirms, than to participate in the revolutions of the earth?

Indian Larry

2006-08-27T07:50:00.000-07:00

From the Washington City Paper, Aug. 26, 2006

Indian Larry

By Timothy White

Merrell, 192 pp., $49.95

By Pamela Murray Winters

I’d like to know what the guys down at the Swamp Circle Saloon, our local pub for two-wheeled clubbers and their four-wheeled wannabees, think of Indian Larry, the man and the book. But damned if I’m venturing in there with this gorgeous, gold-and-purple-foil-embellished coffee-table book to ask. Larry Desmedt, who got his nickname from the Indian motorcycle line—one of western Massachusetts’ big three exports, along with singer-songwriter folk and lesbians—apprenticed with hot-rod customizers Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and Kenny “Von Dutch” Howard when he wasn’t getting drunk or, later, sober. And as with Big Daddy and Von Dutch, his image threatened to eclipse his actual work: Can someone who frequented the Discovery Channel be an outlaw? Was his street cred dented when he rode with Harrison Ford? However rock-star he might have gone, Desmedt’s skill as an artist is undeniable. Indian Larry welds together the work of two artists: Larry, of course, but also Timothy White, the celebrity portraitist who was his friend. The text is limited to brief tributes from collaborator Paul Cox (barstool-affectionate), Matthew Barney (haute-poetic), and White, who offers the closest thing to a written bio here: “Indian Larry was a motorcycle artist. He built rolling sculpture. He worked as a stuntman, an actor, a model. He was a philosopher, a sage, and a clown. He had known homelessness and drug addiction. He had been a bank robber and a convict. He became sober and spiritual, a visionary. He was insane and brilliant.” Larry’s 2004 death, from a relatively innocuous stunt—standing on his moving bike, he fell, perhaps distracted by glaring sunlight, and hit his head—is handled economically, with a short remembrance by Choppers Inc. founder Billy Lane, but the photo that follows, of a makeshift shrine at Larry’s East Village studio, speaks more eloquently. Throughout, White uses the language of photography with a poet’s skill, offering a variety of perspectives on Larry’s custom creations: not only his motorcycles but also his tattooed body and tender-tough persona. The full-color depictions of Larry’s bikes would probably have the guys at the Swamp drooling all over the slick, heavy pages, admiring the gold trim and Roth-inspired painting on “Daddy-O,” the faux bamboo of “Tiki,” and the Escher-esque helices he forged out of the downtube of “Rolex,” a bike he built for White. There are a handful of action shots—none of them showing any Knievel-type stunt work, just Larry having fun—and a few celebrity-infected glamour poses, most regrettably one in which Larry stands next to Liza Minnelli as she lifts her shirt to reveal a tiny heart-shaped tat under her tit. The glitz is balanced by photos that might have been taken at a family reunion, Sturgis-style: Larry cuddling a Chihuahua, mirroring the profile of the Indian figurehead on one of his bikes, and wading bare-assed into a pond. In one masterful black-and-white triptych, a sequence of overhead shots, Larry autographs the left breast of a young woman in sunglasses as a couple of choppers and the jean-clad legs of viewers encircle them. He writes; he sticks out his tongue like a benign Gene Simmons; he gives the camera a radiant smile. She beams the whole time. As did, it seems, the admirers and friends who put together this lavish, if not comprehensive, encomium.

Golem, Fresh Off Boat

2006-08-25T06:49:00.000-07:00

Washington Post, Friday, August 25, 2006; Page WE08

GOLEM "Fresh Off Boat" J-Dub

THE FIRST TASTE of klezmer music can be a revelation: It has such soul, such jazz -- it's foreign yet, via pop culture and the collective subconscious, it's deeply familiar. When a blue-haired New York indie kid named Annette Ezekiel rediscovered the music of her own heritage, it's no wonder she took to it. And it's no wonder that Golem, the group she founded, makes music that's so immediately accessible.

"Ushti Baba," "Fresh Off Boat's" opening track, kicks off with an accordion and trombone intro, followed by Yiddish singing. But the drums offer a hyper-quick, club-style pulse. That bass is pretty funky, and the violin's wail is so high and reedy that it sounds like that horror-flick staple, the theremin. And the manic gargle/warble of Aaron Diskin will stir deep feelings of nostalgia in anyone who has attended a Pere Ubu concert.

Where's the line between tradition and pop? Golem plays like it doesn't matter, with vigor and sometimes cheeky melodrama. "Golem Hora," with Lenny Kaye on guitar and Mike Gordon on bass, is the least traditional track, even as it boasts a familiar tune, to which Diskin sings, "Have-a-tequila . . ." and then begs agitatedly, "Where is the lime and salt?"

"Warsaw Is Khelm," sung in English by Diskin and Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, tells of a man who leaves home for Warsaw but accidentally ends up back in his home town, which he then sees through fresh eyes. It's a sort of metaphor for the music: Is Golem, now playing clubs and sold for its "punk-rock sensibility," Warsaw or Khelm, hipster discovery or ageless party fare? Either way, it's as captivating as that first margarita.

-- Pamela Murray Winters

Jenn Lindsay (Rambles)

2006-08-24T23:48:00.000-07:00

From the online magazine Rambles (www.rambles.net)

Jenn Lindsay:
woman at work
An interview by
Pamela Murray Winters,
August 2003

All over America, outcasts and disaffected adolescents, gays and pagans and other square pegs get the same message, perhaps from the collective unconscious: Go to New York. Which is why New York has so many cool baristas, legal proofreaders and bookstore clerks.

Still, you can live in New York and be an artist -- however difficult the financial struggles -- and find people who will accept you.

Jenn Lindsay is part of an East Village movement known as "antifolk." The musicians in this collective share an enthusiasm for vital, not-necessarily-marketing-friendly music. This would include Lindsay's body of work: three CDs, including the recently released Fired!, and an EP, not to mention lots of New York gigs.

"When I moved to NYC after graduating from college, about a year and a half ago," says Lindsay, "I spent the first few months comparing myself to every other musician I heard, particularly the women. I was always hearing someone and immediately trying to tell if I were 'better' or not, and if they were 'better,' just felt suspicious and judgmental. It fucks you up to think like that though, and after a while you have to ask why you're writing music at all. And what I arrived at one day is that as great as other people's songwriting can be, as much as I could never write what they were writing, they couldn't write what I am writing.

"When I first started writing I tried to be Ani DiFranco and felt very bitter that I was still Jenn Lindsay. Until one day I wrote an honest song and it felt so good, and so different, that I decided to try to do that from then on."

Lindsay became hooked on music in high school, in San Diego. "I had the coolest math teacher in high school, Rob Ridgway. He taught math with a guitar." She demonstrates: "There once was an integer ... laa laa laa ... .We started a folk band, doing covers mostly, and played all over San Diego. In early college I found solace from my complete inability to relax or have anything other than intense, desperate friendships, by playing the same songs on my guitar. I started writing music one summer when I was living in Peru and supposed to be doing anthropology research. Instead I stayed in my hut and strummed chords on this backpacker guitar, singing lovelorn tortured songs for this straight girl I was in love with. I was positive that the perfect song would convert her. Thank god it didn't work, because she remained my tortured muse for the next year and half, until I started writing about other people I wanted, my frustrations at school, and the sense of responsibility I was developing as a folksinger to speak my mind about larger, more communal issues."

Among the issues that concern Lindsay is appearance. "I used to write a pathetic cavalcade of songs about body image because I felt so wronged by the fact that I am not a super-thin woman. And maybe it was those very songs that helped me out of the problem in my head, or maybe it was just a continual effort to remind myself that I don't really find women in the popular industry to be very attractive. I am continually rewriting the paradigm of beauty and body size, at least in my head. I think a lot -- more than I want to admit -- about the possibility that my appearance will hold me back. ... I find solace in the reigning truth that talent and drive persevere beyond appearance."

Lindsay's album Gotta Lotta reflects her growing optimism. "I used to write very long, very sad songs about the world, the Man, my belly, girls and boys who didn't love me back, sexual violence ... etc. But now I try to write songs that are more encouraging to myself and to the people listening. I say lots of things like 'Don't think there is something wrong with you,' because any thing that tries to tell me I am not doing okay just frustrates me. I say it to myself enough! One day I read this quote by Woody Guthrie: 'I hate a song that makes you think that you're not any good. I hate a song that just makes you think that you are born to lose. I am out to fight those kind of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.' This helps me keep my priorities straight."

It also helps her get through the day jobs. "I have had a veritable cornucopia of stupid jobs: receptionist, admin assistant, program director, flower shop telephone girl, publicist, chiropractor's assistant. They never last long, but it's fodder for new music!" Of course, "this occurs to me only after I cry for three days straight after being fired." Hence her latest album, which she deems "one big middle-finger-thrust at the imbeciles of the job world."

Of course, there's every indie artist's dream/nightmare: What would happen if Elektra or Capitol came to call?

"I think it would take a lot of courage to reject any major label wooing," she muses. "The notion of playing huge shows and gaining enough recognition to carve out a long-lived career as a songwriter is super-dreamy for any performer. But once they start talking about the exploitative aspects of a major label deal -- the image construction, the surrender of copyrights and album rights, the notion of owing money to a conglomerate getting rich on my work, the writer's block that would ensue after being on the cover of Rolling Stone or winning a Grammy ... then I think I could walk away from it.

"Accepting a major label deal is no guarantee of success ... turning one down might even be a bigger sign that that person will get somewhere, because they've got guts and enough talent to get the attention of some businessmen who think they can make a wad of dough off their art.

"Overall I think remaining indie is the only way to maintain pride in your own career path. I would rather fail at my own projects, my own dreams, than succeed at someone else's plan for me," Lindsay declares. Especially if their plan involved them getting rich off of my work."

Eliza Carthy (Dirty Linen, late 2001)

2006-08-24T23:38:00.001-07:00

From Dirty Linen magazine #97 (Dec '01/Jan '02).

Eliza Carthy

Shock of the New

by Pamela Murray Winters

“Oh, I’m not a fiddler anymore.”

^It’s hard to tell whether the woman on the other end of the phone, Eliza Carthy, is being serious or playful. She is adept at both states of being, and both are essential to who she is as an artist. In person, you might be clued in by a wry smile, a self-deprecating moue, or a flash in those dark elfin eyes. With just her voice as a guide, you can spot her joke by the smoky, infectious chuckle, sometimes erupting into a guffaw.

No, Carthy hasn’t given up the fiddle, or much else, lately. If anything, she’s taking on more and more, particularly by carving out a new identity as a pop artist with her Warner Bros. album Angels and Cigarettes. Touring this past summer with a seven-piece band (including herself) at festivals and small clubs, she offered a set list drawing heavily on Angels and with hints of similar new material for future recordings; the only hint of tradition in evidence was the Moog-driven arrangement of “Adieu, Adieu” that appeared on her 1998 album Red Rice.

When asked whether people were averse to her new direction — for there have been rumblings that she should stay in her little folky pigeonhole and not dabble in pop — she said, “I suppose it depends on how into human endeavor you are.

“I haven’t stopped doing the traditional music at all. I produced my mum’s traditional solo album [Bright Shiny Morning] last year, me and my accordion player have just made an album’s worth of traditional music as well, and Waterson:Carthy is scheduled to make another album in October. So as far as I’m concerned, I’m just trying to do a new thing. I’ve been doing the same job for 12 years! I’ve fancied learning a new skill. For instance, I fancied seeing whether I could write an album’s worth of my own songs, which is something I’ve never tried to do before.”

Carthy thrives on new things. It would be too easy to cite her ever-changing hair color as evidence of her chimerical nature; better to look at her discography, which boasts a surprising number of different lineups for one so young. “I’ve been making records since I was 17; I’ve been making, like, two records a year since I was 17. It’s very hard to sound the same from one week to the next when you’re that age, let alone one album to the next!”

Still, it’s a great leap from Waterson:Carthy’s a cappella rendition of “The Grey Cock” (learned from her mother, who learned it from a 1960s recording of Mrs. Cecilia Costello) to the full-bore trip-hop of Angels’ “Whole” (written with Barnaby Stradling, Sam Thomas, and Carthy beau/bandmate/Peatbog Faerie Ben Ivitsky):

Do you smell my breathing around you,
My body breathing you in
My self and my soul and grace, you are so still
So transient and so mine
If only I could breathe you all the time

“It would be much easier for everybody concerned if I just decided on one style and stuck to it,” Carthy acknowledged. “But it doesn’t interest me.”

The challenge to write an album’s worth of songs, for Angels, “ended up being quite hard. There’s all kinds of things involved in signing to a major label — all kinds of constraints involved. I was really quite attracted by some of those constraints — by some of the disciplines that you have to go through to record an album of that kind. You have to put yourself under a producer — which, of course, I chose, along with the record label. But you do have to be beholden to him, to a certain extent.

“I can write really very oblique songs, very mysterious songs. And sometimes I need somebody to tell me that they actually don’t know what I’m talking about! I need to make a bit more sense, you know, and perhaps have a chorus — that kind of thing. I can write existential poetry until I puke, but it’s a good idea to learn how to make things into songs with choruses that people can get a handle on and understand.

“You can be as oblique as you like in traditional music. That’s part of the attraction for me. It’s like, ‘When it says he bit into the apple, did he really bite into the apple, or did he go to bed with that woman?’ That sort of thing. You can keep elements of that in songwriting, but if you have too much of that, it becomes like listening to Alanis Morrisette’s second album!” She chuckled mischievously. “It’s like, ‘What’s going on? I don’t understand….’ So I had to tame my more wild and weird edges.

“To actually start from scratch, musically and lyrically and everything, and create a song, and certainly a cohesive album’s worth of songs, is very, very different from working with traditional music.”

Carthy is used to working with different materials — not her own thoughts and sketched-out melodies, but the snippets found in old manuscripts or on acetates of long-dead sources for Alan Lomax and Cecil Sharp. Concerning traditional music, she is serious to the point of near-zealotry. “Music is fun, but when you start to engage with something like traditional music, you do have to have an opinion, you do have to feel strongly about it. If you’re playing a marginalized music, which I am, then you have to be able to tell people why you do it. Ever since I first started doing this, I’ve been answering that question: Why do you play traditional music? And so, having worked out my response to that, to then swap and do a pop band and go sign to a major label and everything, people are gonna want to know why! And I’ve spent a long time really thinking about it and coming up with answers that I feel are honest and worthwhile.

“There’s certainly people who do come and see my traditional shows who wouldn’t come and see the pop band. But then I would very much expect that, and I don’t have a problem with that at all.” She does, however, admit to an ulterior motive for her singer/songwriter career, hoping that it will “feed back into my traditional work, in that I’ll be able to have a higher profile on which to base my proclamations that I’m taking traditional music to a wider audience. It is part of a plan for me. I’ve been playing to the converted for such a long time now that I really want to try to get some general public into traditional music. The only way I can see to do that is by actually sticking my neck out and sticking myself out there where it’s dangerous, where there is the chance that people will say I’ve sold out, and that sort of thing. I haven’t, as far as I’m concerned. But I’ve never been one to play it safe. My personal crusade is to do with getting people’s awareness increased of English traditional music, and I feel that I can do this through this project.”

It’s clear that Carthy has no plans to forget her roots. Noting that the British don’t yet have a counterpart to O Brother, Where Art Thou? she vowed “to teach people about the many varieties of English traditional music.

“There’s so much Celtic music around that’s so much fun, why would anybody want to plow through books of 9/4 hornpipes with 27 different variations and pick out the best ones and then figure out how to play it? Why would anybody want to do that? I dunno! Why would anybody want to do that when they could just go down the pub and play ‘Drowsy Maggie’ as many times as they like?

“There’s so much available music on the folk scene, I could understand why people aren’t necessarily interested in doing the research. But that was the way I was brought up. That’s how my parents work, and that’s how they taught me to work as well. Dig — find the versions that nobody knows. If you don’t like that verse, write another verse.”

Then again, this heir to a folk fortune has it easier than most of us when it comes to research: “I just phone up my mum and dad and say, ‘Come on then, show us your best songbooks,’ and they have got some good ones.”

Carthy grew up with the songbooks of Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, as well as Waterson’s singing siblings in the Watersons. She first took to the stage some 12 years ago, with her aunt Lal’s daughter Maria, as the Waterdaughters, and turned professional at 17, doing solo work and fronting her own groups as well as joining her parents for Waterson:Carthy. “The thing about Waterson:Carthy is that I do ‘play the daughter’… I mean, some people prefer me in that sense, because I’m restricted in a way. Which is good — I don’t have a problem with that. There’s constraints involved in being in your parents’ band. Although I am an active member of the band, it’s my mum’s only performance outlet, for instance, so it’s kind of like standing back a little bit. Some people prefer me as a backing person, rather than fronting my own thing.”

While Maria offers backing vocals on Norma Waterson’s Bright Shiny Morning, of the next Waterson-Carthy generation only Eliza and Lal’s son Oliver Knight have made music a career. “My youngest cousin Eleanor is interested in perhaps singing with Waterson:Carthy, and I’m trying to orchestrate that — phoning my mum and saying ‘Have you spoken to Eleanor yet? Have you asked her?’ She’s 21. She’s got a lovely voice. So I’m trying to get another member of the family involved. What else would you do with all those genes, eh? Sloshing around there, being no use to anybody.”

If it seems odd that the headstrong Carthy capitulated so readily to her destiny at the forefront of English traditional music, she’ll tell you of her candle-brief musical rebellion.

“I went away for a year to a school — it was only about 25 miles away, but with the area that we lived being so weatherbeaten, it became quite hard to travel to school every day during the winter, for instance. So I moved into this boarding school about 25 miles from where we lived. For about six months I went through this period of readjustment. I’d never really been in the outside world before. I grew up on a farm, I grew up in this very insular environment, and I wasn’t very popular at my primary school. All the kids lived in the village, and all their families lived in the village. The local farmers’ kids, they had their things to do, they had their friends, and I was very different.

“I really retreated into myself for a very long time. And then when I went away to this school, when I was 11, I really had to adjust…My parents used to go away for the summer. Every two years they would go on tour in America, for instance. And I would stay with my aunt or with my best friend in the village. And all the kids were like, ‘Hang on a minute, your parents are going away for the entire summer, and they’re not taking you with them! What does that mean?’ And I would say, ‘They’re working. That’s what they do.’ And that wasn’t really understood at all. I do remember having a bit of a mental switch, when I was 11, thinking people do not understand and, not only that, but were really quite hostile toward the idea. People are very hostile toward itinerant musicians that live on farms.”

So, for about six months, “I kind of rejected the whole family thing for a while, in order to listen to Pepsi and Shirley, which was well worth it! I mean, it would have been cool if I’d have been listening to the Police or something.” Instead, it was Wham!’s backing singers — and more: “I know all of the words to [Europe’s] ‘The Final Countdown.’ Oh, and I bought Bat Out of Hell as well. I had a ‘leather and lace’ compilation, with Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler. I loved that record. And I still have it!”

Fortunately, she recovered, and although myriad influences are found on Angels, from Van Dyke Parks’s massed strings on “Fuse” to Dolphin Boy’s programming on “Beautiful Girl,” and from an almost-folky melody on the edgy, melancholy “Train Song” to a nod to punk-popster (and Pepsi’s predecessor Dee C. Lee’s ex-husband) Paul Weller on the album’s only cover song, “Wildwood,” there’s nary a hint of Meat Loaf to be found.

“It’s hard work, going from being at the top of your field to being at the bottom of somebody else’s field,” said Carthy about joining the ranks of singer/songwriters. “But I enjoy challenges. I’ve never played it safe. I’m sure there are many people in the world who would prefer it if I did.”

Apparently. Mike Ross of the Edmonton Sun gave Eliza’s new lineup a C+ with the comment “rough road from traditional folk to contemporary pop.” But Ellen Rawson at femmusic.com represented the viewpoint Carthy hoped to hear when, reviewing an early show by the Angels band, she noted that Carthy “hasn’t lost anything; she’s merely made a change.”

Carthy admitted to a certain uneasiness about how her new direction would be accepted. “When I was touring with my folk lineups,” she explained, “we were selling out venues everywhere we went. What I envisaged happening when I finally toured [with the new band] was people showing up for the first tour, and going away, and the audiences really dropping off, and people going away to make their minds up.” But that wasn’t what happened when she hit the U.K. tour circuit. “Nobody turned up! It was very quiet. Some very committed fans turned up, and some people who were merely curious, but we were playing for third- or half-full venues. And we got a couple of good reviews, and the second tour was a lot better and culminated in this really fantastic gig in London.”

The playing field was different in the U.S., where she was known to folkies from her work with her family or from her guest slot on Joan Baez’s spring 2000 tour. “Over in America, I don’t have to convince anybody. I’m merely another person at the bottom of a very long, very high ladder. And people will come out of curiosity — and our friends, and some of our established audiences, will come — some American folkies will come. They’re generally really lovely, really enthusiastic, really open-minded. I love American audiences; I always have. They really just want to let you do whatever it is that you want to do. They want to be pleased. You get a lot of chin-scratching in England. You get a lot of people who stand at the back and check you out and think about it.”

She calls the reception for her music in the U.K. and the United States “very different. People are really warming to the idea in the U.K. I said this thing about human endeavor…I’m really not going anywhere, and I think people are starting to figure that out. Certainly because I have more fans in the U.K. than I have in the U.S., there is a certain amount of convincing of people that needs to be done. Or maybe not — maybe they just need to make their minds up.”

Whatever they decide, it’s fine with her. She’ll continue making all sorts of music: “Drop me on a desert island, and I’ll make something out of a tree and some coconuts, and then I’ll play it.” She’s already got some 17 songs for a followup to Angels, including the sublimely lovely and erotic “Lazy Angel,” a favorite on her 2001 tours. And she’s recently fallen in love with Leicestershire smallpipes. While producing Bright Shiny Morning, Ivitsky brought in his family friend Julian Goodacre, a Scottish bagpipe maker, for some sessions. “We were all sitting in the kitchen, having a tune, and a few glasses of whisky, like one is apt to do, and I said, ‘Can I have a go on them?’ ” Emboldened by her success, she asked Goodacre for pipes of her very own. “He sorted me out a set. They’re cherry wood. They’re very beautiful. I love them, and I make a really horrible noise on them!” (They sounded charming when Carthy premiered them on a recent Waterson:Carthy tour.)

Carthy just keeps giving the audiences more to love — or at least keeping them on their toes. She acknowledges that her longtime fans have rolled with the changes, and will probably keep on rolling. “I require a lot from my audience. I feel very sorry for them sometimes!”

Diana Krall, The Girl in the Other Room

2006-08-24T23:30:00.000-07:00

From Paste #11 (Aug. 2004)

Diana Krall - The Girl in the Other Room
Verve

Diana Krall has been wowing mainstream audiences for the past decade with her smooth, spare sound. If you like your jazz tidy, shiny and highly competent, you probably already have her CDs cozied up to that well-worn copy of Come Away With Me. But if you’re among the music snobs who, when she married Elvis Costello, wondered, “What does he see in her?” The Girl in the Other Room will attempt to answer your question.

Half the disc’s songs were co-written with her new hubby, and they’re among the best and worst of Girl. On the title tune, Anthony Wilson’s simple Spanish-style acoustic guitar backs a vocal as soft and yummy as butter. “Narrow Daylight,” an anthemic, uplifting Krall tune dyed blue by pensive guitar, piano and voice, is the album’s highlight. She seems to enjoy channeling Joni Mitchell on “I’m Coming Through” (and it’s far superior to her leaden cover of Joni’s “Black Crow” three tracks earlier). But before most of these collaborative successes, you have to get through the dismal “I’ve Changed My Address,” on which Krall, you guessed it, changes her form of address. Suddenly the warm alto, whose understated quality proves both its charm and its pitfall, dips into growls and oddly enunciated phrases—the line “blonde hair cascades on black leather” is especially grating.

Though most of the album’s covers—Mose Allison’s “Stop This World” and Tom Waits’ “Temptation” among them—sound fairly dull, Krall does a pretty good Costello; “Almost Blue,” if not exactly trumping her husband’s original, is nonetheless distinctive, with a delicately measured pace and an almost impossibly low, brooding vocal. Her beautifully hushed reading of Arthur Herzog and Irene Kitchings’ “I’m Pulling Through” spotlights her piano prowess, which is too often overshadowed by the singer’s vocal style and lyrical interpretations. In “Almost Blue,” Costello seems to have penned an accurate assessment of this disc: “It’s almost touching / It will almost do.”

Ari Hest, Someone To Tell

2006-08-24T23:27:00.000-07:00

From Paste #12 (Oct. 2004)

Ari Hest - Someone To Tell
Columbia

It’s hard to lift yourself off the mountainous heap of singer/songwriters, even if you’re Ari Hest—blessed with an appealingly husky baritone, a major-label slot and, not incidentally, a beetle-browed, cherub-lipped face. This former touring partner of Guster and Jason Mraz sounds a whole lot like those guys, with straightforward folk rock interspersed with mildly swaggering rhythmic material. The latter comes via a song called “Consistency”—which is not Hest’s problem; if anything, he should aim for less of it. Amidst the pretty love ballads (“Anne Marie”), songs about ditching this town (“Aberdeen”) and other teenage fare is an alluringly melancholy co-write with Marvin Etzioni, “Strangers Again.” “I want yesterday to come back again,” Hest begs. “Nothing is as simple as I once knew …before the day that I lost you.” It sounds like a big loss, too, as the unexpected, pensive chord progression steps out of pop-song accessibility into something mystical. If Hest wants to rise above the crowd next time, he needs more of this stuff and less of the coffeehouse-lothario cuteness of “Fascinate You.” We’ve got enough Dave Matthews clones out there; a few more Van Morrisons wouldn’t be so bad.

Sinead O'Connor, She Who Dwells in the Shadow of the Longest Damn Album Title in Christendom...

2006-08-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

That full title: She Who Dwells in the Secret Place of the Most High Shall Abide Under the Shadow of the Almighty. Paste abbreviates it on the Web site as shown, but I don't recall whether the print version has the full title.

From Paste #8 (2004)

Sinead O'Connor - She Who Dwells in the Secret...
Vanguard

Sinead O’Connor played the Virgin Mary in 1997’s The Butcher Boy, and, by God, she hasn’t forgotten it. But the artist who’s so often said, by deed, “Look at me,” now wants us to look away. She Who Dwells… is, she says, her final full-length album. “Since I no longer seek to be a ‘famous’ person,” she writes in a statement on the Internet, “… could people please afford me my privacy? … I am a very shy person, believe it or not.” Shy or not, she’s helmed a career that’s steered uneasily between submission to the Almighty and lust for a bully pulpit. She Who Dwells… reveals O’Connor’s balance of heaven and earth, and what a heady balance it is. Disc one offers rare studio cuts, including a number of effective covers: “Do Right Man” becomes a sacrament and “Love Hurts” an almost-jaded slow-dancer. Bells and echoes, deep bass and O’Connor’s soaring soprano … the results are often glorious. Disc Two, a concert recording including “Nothing Compares 2 U,” offers much of the same. An armchair theologist might wonder whether the Holy Virgin ever gets sick of being garlanded; a concertgoing cynic might ponder that O’Connor, unlike Mary, chose her place in the spotlight. In choosing to bow out, she’s left us a fine body of work, including this album. Just don’t tell her that if you see her on the street.

George Pelecanos, Paste magazine

2006-08-24T21:50:00.000-07:00

From Paste magazine (which seems to be averse to the "Murray" in my name), issue 12, 2004.

George Pelecanos' Capitol City Soul

Washington, D.C., was a tense place to be in 1968. White suburbanites generally viewed “the District line” as a sort of Berlin Wall. Black city dwellers erupted in fury after Martin Luther King’s assassination. Schoolyard fights were often racially motivated; though official segregation was gone, self-imposed school-cafeteria segregation continued. Only music seemed to bridge the gap.

“In ’68, at the time of the riots, I was 11 years old,” George Pelecanos recalls. “My dad had a lunch counter at 19th and M, and I worked [there]. His employees were all black. He let them play what they wanted—which was WOOK and WOL”—the twin flagship stations of black-oriented music at the time. “That was the summer I got interested in music.”

Pelecanos (who himself lives inside the Beltway, in Silver Spring, Md.) isn’t a musician. Rather, he’s an acclaimed author of crime fiction set in the nation’s capital. His 13th novel, Hard Revolution, features protagonist Derek Strange, who’s familiar to Pelecanos fans. But this book, set in 1968, looks back at the genesis of his anti-hero. “It explores who he is as a middle-aged man. In the previous three Strange novels, I was dropping hints about his past. … There was something that happened in his past that made him become a police officer, and then made him leave the force,” Pelecanos says.

For the author, the time travel involved immersing himself in the music of his childhood (and Strange’s young manhood): “Before I start writing, I go out and buy a bunch of music from the period.”

With this novel, though, Pelecanos went a bit further. He’d been wanting to produce an accompanying CD since 1997’s King Suckerman, a bicentennial-era story he calls “the American Graffiti of funk.”

He wasn’t able to persuade his publisher, Warner, that this would work, he says, until a fellow Warner writer recently had the same idea: “Michael Connelly convinced them to let him produce a jazz CD to go with one of his books, City of Bones … He’s got a little bit more clout than I do. So he sort of kicked the door open for me.”

Pelecanos’ “soundtrack” to Hard Revolution was given away at readings and with online purchases. (With the book’s success, he’s nearly out of copies of the CD.) Featuring liner notes on his website by one of his heroes, Peter Guralnick, it offers eight cuts of “the underexposed side of ’60s soul—I’m not talking about Motown, but Deep South soul—Stax-Volt and like that.

“When I went for Percy Sledge, I definitely didn’t want ‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’ I wanted ‘It Tears Me Up.’ For Sam and Dave, ‘I Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down.’ And then there’s The Impressions’ ‘A Fool for You.’ Curtis Mayfield is a hero of mine. … I didn’t want to put protest music in there. I wanted love songs. These are the songs these people listened to. So I didn’t want ‘People Get Ready.’ But one of the reasons I admire Curtis Mayfield is how brave he is. ‘This is my country, with people darker than blue …’ You can’t ignore Mayfield, especially in the context of the book.”

Pelecanos further explores his musical interests on his website, where he gives readers his listening choices (this summer’s include the Drive-By Truckers, Johnny Cash and the vintage Jamaican soul covers on Darker than Blue: Soul from Jamdown 1973–1980). And his favorite sounds slip into his writing in other ways. As story editor for the popular HBO crime drama The Wire, set up the road in Baltimore, he’s wielded a minor musical influence: in a scene last season Detective Jimmy McNulty, on a bender, seeks his own soundtrack. “When he’s drunk, he throws the Pogues in the tape deck?” Pelecanos recalls. “That was me.”

Stephen Kilduff

2006-08-24T21:38:00.000-07:00

Visit Stephen Kilduff's Web page at www.stephenkilduff.com.

There's a funny comment on this story on the Baltimore City Paper site, along the lines of "Congrats on the play! Have you thought of turning it into a screenplay?"

From the Baltimore City Paper, Aug, 16, 2006.

The Writer Side
Former Fiction Devotee and Would-Be Filmmaker Stephen Kilduff Discovers That the Play’s The Thing

By Pamela Murray Winters

"My wife said, `You're more suited to a blank stage with two people talking.'" Stephen Kilduff allows a pause, then deadpans, "I'm not sure that was a compliment."

A simplicity of approach, a directness of purpose--these seem to be Kilduff's virtues. They're paying off for the 48-year-old Catonsville resident as he sees the first production of one of his plays: Snow on the Stand runs at New York's American Theatre of Actors from Aug. 16 to 20.

Kilduff is definitely dazzled by making it if not on Broadway, at least near Broadway. Like many writers, from time to time he's considered relocating to New York. "There are times when I thought, Maybe I'll leave," he says. "But one thing or another kept me from leaving."

The lifelong resident of the Baltimore area is also a lifelong writer. "By high school, I was getting the urge to imagine stories and lives--maybe because it was occurring to me that mine was not that interesting."

As a graduate of the University of Baltimore with a degree in English, Kilduff has always made a livelihood through words. He worked as a proofreader and copy editor at City Paper for four and a half years in the late 1980s and early '90s. He's now a freelance scientific copy editor, an arrangement that leaves him time for his storytelling. He started with fiction. In fact, when he worked at CP, it published fiction more often, and he contributed.

But around 1999 something drew his eye elsewhere. "I got an idea that I thought would work as a movie," Kilduff says. "I could see it cinematically." There ensued a period in which he taught himself about the movie business--not taking screenwriting courses, as so many do. His education was "just observing and reading and figuring it out."

And the more he observed, the more he figured out that the movie business was a bad match for him. There was the matter of Hollywood. "I didn't want to move out there," he says, a little harshly. But there was also the matter of muse vs. mammon.

"For a very lucky few [screenwriters]," Kilduff says, the movie business "means million-dollar contracts and Academy Awards. For most people, it's revisions of other people's scripts and adaptations of books you wouldn't want to read. That's what would happen--if I was lucky."

It wasn't the sort of luck he wanted for himself. And he was appalled by a couple of visits to screenwriters' conferences "out there": "Everybody was selling wares," he says.

What he calls the "slow realization--three years in the making--that screenwriting wasn't going to work" led him, about two years ago, to turn his attention to plays. "The emphasis in plays is so much more about human relationships," Kilduff says. "In a movie you start out and you see a person's apartment, and you know something about them." In a play, characters and themes develop differently. "This spareness of telling the story through conversation and dialogue appeals to me."

By last spring, after readings in Baltimore, he had three plays ready to be produced, and he packaged them up and sent them out to theaters whose names he got from the Dramatists Sourcebook. What happened with Snow on the Stand, the newest of the three, he calls dumb luck: "It landed on the desk of the right guy at the right time."

The right guy was James Jennings, president and artistic director of the American Theatre of Actors, which is dedicated to developing and showcasing the work of newer playwrights. "It's a developmental theater," Kilduff says. "They're not committing two months to this unknown play by this unknown playwright. They can just put it on and see what happens."

Jennings--who founded ATA in 1976 and also fields all the theater's phone calls--is a fellow so busy that when an interviewer asks for a few seconds to grab a paper and pen, he barks, "I don't have much time," and keeps going. "We produce 20 to 22 shows a season," Jennings says over the phone. "We have 20 playwrights in our company. We have eight directors in our company. We have four theaters. We've been in business for 30 years.

"We get 800 submissions a year, from out of nowhere. I read all 800, and I pick 20 to 30, based on credibility. Then I let my directors pick. Out of that 30 that I tend to like, I'll produce six or seven."

Snow on the Stand appealed to both Jennings and director Annie Coburn. It tells the story of 50-year-old Harry and his siblings, confronting their different beliefs about the disposition of their father's estate. "I liked how quiet and controlled the play is and the emotional explosion at the end," Coburn says. "I'm from Cleveland, which has a huge set of Rust Belt problems like closing factories and companies bought out by large conglomerations, so one of the themes in the play that deals with a concept of new business and old business really attracted me.

"I feel that the challenge in the show is to make all of the characters both likable as well as guilty or complicit," she continues. "I want the audience to come away from the play recognizing these family dynamics like their own--where long-buried problems become a minefield. I want them to be able to talk about who is really at fault and have that not be so cut and dried."

Kilduff himself sees a slightly different thread running through his plays. "The one theme that is present in the plays--it's not something I set out to do--is of middle-aged men who are sort of lost in their lives: looking forward, looking back," he says. "[Snow] is the harshest of the plays. It doesn't leave a whole lot of hope for Harry.

"It's no mystery why a 48-year-old man would be interested in this [theme]," he continues. But he stresses that his plays are not autobiographical. "As a writer, from the beginning, I've been interested in `stories' rather than `my story.'"

Kilduff hasn't seen Snow yet--he's excited about attending the production, which he hasn't been involved with at all--but he's more focused on what's next down the ongoing stream of creation. "Writing's not a young person's pursuit, exclusively," he says. "It is not like gymnastics or theoretical physics. Since I've gotten more serious about pursuing the playwriting, I'm working less and less [on copy editing]--and my wife allows me to do that."

It's a life that works for him. "What I often do is stop in the middle of the day and take a really long lunch--just sit and write and eat," he says. Scheduling time to write doesn't work for him; instead, he goes where inspiration takes him. And right now, he's pondering a theme that should come as no surprise, given the recent turn his life has taken--"the nature of luck."

Klezmatics, Wonder Wheel

2006-08-24T21:28:00.000-07:00

From last week's Washington City Paper (Aug, 18, 2006).

Wonder Wheel
The Klezmatics
Jewish Music Group

As posthumous careers go, Woody Guthrie’s had a solid one—much like Ronald Reagan’s, only without as many airports. The passionate yet pragmatic songwriter’s continued success is due greatly to his daughter Nora, who has been doling out the rights to his unreleased verses to musicians she deems worthy of propagating her father’s legacy. Though 1998’s Mermaid Avenue allowed Billy Bragg and Wilco to treat Guthrie’s work as that of an American-lefty troubadour, Wonder Wheel goes back to Guthrie’s Jewish roots, setting his words to tunes by members of the New York–based Klezmatics in their first English-language disc. Which doesn’t explain why Irish New Yorker Susan McKeown does so many of the vocals—but with a plangent alto like hers, who needs an explanation? “Mermaid’s Avenue,” a sort of Caribbean/campfire-folk fusion composed by Frank London, has its quirky touches, and the somewhat unctuous-voiced Lorin Sklamberg wisely resists overselling lyrics that describe the ’hood as a place where “the smokefish meets the pretzel” and “the borscht sounds like the sea.” But much of the album is as dark as Guthrie’s own lengthy death from Huntington’s disease. “Come When I Call You,” a variant on the counting song “Go Where I Send Thee,” offers “Ten for the atom bomb loose again” and “Nine for the crippled and blind,” on down to “One’s for the pretty little baby that’s born...and gone away”—possibly a reference to the death of Guthrie’s young daughter Cathy in 1946, three years prior to its composition. Matt Darriau’s minor-key, brooding setting of “Pass Away” reinforces the fatalism of its lyrics. There are brighter spots, including “Headdy Down,” a lovely Yiddish-tinged lullaby with kickass electric guitar from Boo Reiners. Folks who know Guthrie only from “This Land Is Your Land” or because of Wilco might well start with the uncompromisingly folky “Gonna Get Through This World.” Not only because of its irresistible dai-dai-dai singalong chorus, but because of its interweaving of McKeown’s Dublin-accented voice, Reiners’ banjo, Adam Widoff’s tabla, a raft of klezmer horns, and composer Lisa Gutkin’s melancholy violin, it’s the very definition of world music. It’s stirringly idealistic—but also clear-eyed: “I’m gonna get through this world the best I can,” Guthrie wrote in 1945—but then added, perhaps to ward off the dybbuk at the door: “If I can.”—Pamela Murray Winters

Michael McKean and Annette O'Toole, A Mighty Wind (Dirty Linen, April 2004)

2006-08-22T22:34:00.000-07:00

From Dirty Linen #111, Apr/May 2004.

That's a sidebar at the end. I didn't get Guest to talk to me. And maybe I didn't try Shearer, which is strange, since I've interviewed him a couple other times (he's as fascinating as you'd expect him to be).

Oh, yeah, and about that whole "performing at a party" conceit? Rob and I chickened out. At least I got some advice out of it.

Michael McKean & Annette O’Toole

Kiss and Tell

by Pamela Murray Winters

You’re going to a party where everyone has to perform a piece of music. And you haven’t touched a guitar since you struggled through “500 Miles” in fifth-grade music class. What better source than A Mighty Wind, the 2003 comedy about a reunion of 60s folksingers of, uh, diverse levels of talent, with music performed by actors (Parker Posey, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara) not generally thought of as musicians? What better selection than Mitch & Mickey’s signature ballad, “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow”? And who better to give advice than actress-turned-songwriter Annette O’Toole?

“Just remember that Eugene is singing the melody, and it’s really beautiful,” said O’Toole, in a phone call from the Vancouver set of “Smallville,” the hit series on which she plays Clark Kent’s mom. “ ’Cause when we sing the song” — “we” being O’Toole and her husband and “Kiss” co-composer, Michael McKean – “I sing the melody. It makes the song sound very different. But as Michael says, that’s what folk music is all about, is taking a song that you hear and doing it in your own way. So they do a beautiful version of it in the movie, but a lot of people think Catherine’s singing the melody. So when you do it, you sing the melody!”

2003 was a banner year for folk music in film. The Academy Award nominations for best original song in a motion picture gave the nod to mountain music, cabaret, Celtic, and 60s-troubadour sounds. When O’Toole and McKean talked about their nascent songwriting career, it was well before the announcement that one of their maiden efforts — “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” — would be nominated for an Oscar. “Kiss” was one of over a dozen faux-folk gems created for A Mighty Wind by its cast and associates, making the film a landmark of folk — albeit in the same shambling, smile-tweaking way that Big Boy is a landmark in vernacular architecture.

What most moviegoers don’t realize is that McKean — the man behind Wind’s Jerry Palter (think Fairport Convention’s Simon Nicol with less talent, less genuine hair, and more vanity), This Is Spinal Tap’s David St. Hubbins (think Palter with more fake hair, more amperage, and tighter pants), and a host of other iconic characters — goes as far back with the folk scene as the characters in his film.

“I think I wrote my first songs when I was 14 or 15, around there,” McKean explained. “And y’know, I was a big folkie, a big Bob Dylan fan, loved Phil Ochs and people who wrote songs about stuff that was actually happening in the news. I used to read Broadside and Sing Out! and, even more obscure, the Little Sandy Review, which was — I think it was based in Milwaukee, or Madison, maybe. And it was a very academic, very angry paper. Anyone who looked like they might even try on a Kingston Trio shirt in a store got a scathing review! It was about keeping this folk thing on track. So I read a lot of that stuff and, like I said, really admired Phil Ochs and, of course, the older stuff like Woody Guthrie and all that Almanac Singers stuff.”

McKean took the messages to heart: “I wrote a lot of what I thought was terribly groundbreaking, terribly brave — for a 14-year-old — very left-wing stuff. So I did a lot of that, and then when I was in my teens, I wrote some rock ’n’ roll. I was with a couple of bands.”

But his music career wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without comedy. At 22, McKean arrived in Los Angeles and soon became the resident songwriter for a comedy group, the Credibility Gap, which numbered among its members Harry Shearer and David L. Lander. “I kind of was the new guy with the guitar… I became more and more comedic.” When the group needed a musical laugh, McKean was always at the ready: “I always had a guitar, and I was always doing new stuff like that. Mostly parodies.”

McKean and Lander eventually jumped ship to play Lenny and Squiggy on Laverne & Shirley, but they didn’t stop performing: “[Lenny and the Squigtones] actually put out a record on Casablanca…We and Mac Davis were the only non-disco acts on that label.” And the somewhat-heavy-metal Spinal Tap, immortalized on film in 1984, was born in 1978 for a sketch on a Rob Reiner TV special. Later, “when Rob was looking for a feature film to do, to get his feature career under way, we did This Is Spinal Tap. We made a scenario and then improvised the film, but all of the songs were written in that style, that heavy-metal style. We all wrote all of them, in various combinations.”

So it was with A Mighty Wind, a film that featured the Folksmen, whose Palter, Alan Barrows, and Mark Shubb bore a slight resemblance to Tap’s David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, and Derek Smalls. (McKean and cohorts Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer once opened a Spinal Tap show as the Folksmen and were booed off the stage — perhaps a high accolade.) The experience of making This Is Spinal Tap influenced Guest in his later work as a director, on Wind and other films. On Waiting for Guffman (1996) and Best in Show (2000), Guest and co-writer Levy developed their improvisation-within-a-framework style.

McKean says that the key to success in such films is “parodying the form” but also “staying true enough to the form that you believe, with some quarter of your brain, that this could actually be happening...[that] ‘Potato’s in the Paddy Wagon’ could have sold more than one copy.”

Ah, yes — O’Toole’s maiden songwriting effort. On a drive from Los Angeles to Vancouver in September 2001, where truth, justice, and the American way demanded that “Smallville” go on filming even when the planes were grounded, O’Toole got a tune stuck in her head.

“Somewhere, we think between Portland and Seattle, somewhere in there, I had this melody in my head I couldn’t shake,” she explained. “It was ‘da-da-da da-da-da-da-da da-da-da-da’ over and over and over again until I wanted to scream. So I said, ‘Michael, what is this I’m singing in my head — did I just hear this somewhere?’ He said, ‘I think you may have made that up. I think it’s new.’ So we liked the little silly melody, and we put words to it just to kind of hold the melody till we got to a musical instrument, and it was ‘Potato’s in the Paddy Wagon.’ And then we decided we liked that phrase so much that we had to write a song about it.”

“Just to justify that phrase’s existence,” McKean added.

“So ‘Potato’s in the Paddy Wagon,’ which of course was originally a fine russet, became a girl. I said, well, there’s got to be a girl named Potato, and it’s Potato-apostrophe-s, Potato is in the paddy wagon.” They tried out the song on Chris Guest, “who loved it and wanted to put it in A Mighty Wind for the New Main Street Singers, because it seemed just insane enough for that group.”

Besides “Potato” and “Kiss,” McKean and O’Toole — who doesn’t appear in the movie — wrote the New Main Street Singers’ “Fare Away,” a fast-flowing flotsam-load of nautical terms set against a chantey tune, with Wind’s music producer, CJ Vanston. Other songs in the film include the oppressively catchy Folksmen near-hit “Old Joe’s Place,” by Guest, Shearer, and McKean; the inspirational title track, by Levy, Guest, and McKean; and Mitch & Mickey’s poignant “When You’re Next to Me,” written by Levy.

Levy’s Internet Movie Database bio reveals his little-known musical past: The SCTV alum was in the original Toronto cast of “Godspell” and sang as part of the group Northern Lights on the We Are the World album. But many of the Wind-ers were musical neophytes, including Catherine O’Hara and Parker Posey, who learned autoharp and mandolin, respectively, for the film. Seeing Posey’sinstrument prompted O’Toole to take it up, as part of her growing interest in songwriting.

She was already a singer. A veteran of musical theater as well as film, who began acting at 13, she was in a stage production of Vanities in 1981 when she was offered a role in a TV biography of Tammy Wynette. Then in her 20s, “I was kind of the right age to go down to her teens and then up to her advanced age, at the time, of 38,” she said with heavy irony.

“They flew me to Las Vegas, where Tammy was appearing…And she was just wonderful and delightful and just such a great person. And I said, ‘You know, I’ll do this’ — but Sissy Spacek had just played Loretta Lynn, and I said, ‘I sing. I’d really like to do the singing. I know this is presumptuous and sounds egotistical, but I can sound like Tammy enough to do it. And if you have a problem with it, of course you can dub it.’ This was why I really had to meet Tammy — for her to give me the okay and hear me sing.

“So I stood on the stage of this hotel, during her soundcheck, and she sat in the audience, and I sang ‘Stand By Your Man’ for her. I’ve never been that scared! I’ve never — yeah, I guess, since then I may have been almost that scared. But my arms — I didn’t have any arms or legs. I felt like I was just this head. This singing head. That’s how scared I was!

“And I sang, and it went okay, and she was just gracious and wonderful. She said, oh, yes, she can do it. And then I kinda spent the rest of the day with her, and just kinda sat in her dressing room and watched what she did, and watched her, and talked to her, and sat out in the audience and watched her show. She started with ‘Rocky Top’ — which I can now actually play and sing on the mandolin, which is very exciting — and got her okay and went back, and like a week later, we started working.”

A love for music is part of the couple’s common ground; O’Toole recalled realizing that the two were in love while Van Morrison was singing “Have I Told You Lately?” at a May 1998 concert. They married in 1999.

“I’ve been writing songs all my life,” McKean mused. “The last two years, Annette has become this amazing songwriter. I knew I married well, but…” O’Toole laughed. “I didn’t know that—”

“Well, I didn’t either,” she replied. “That’s the amazing thing.”

McKean drew on his wife’s newfound gifts for “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow.” “[Guest] asked Michael to write a song for Mitch & Mickey to sing that would be their signature song throughout their career, and the only stipulation was it had to have a kiss in it — that was the moment there was going to be a kiss. So Michael came home and said, ‘Do you want to write this song with me?’ and I said ‘Sure.’ And I think we may have written it that day.”

McKean remembered differently. “I think we wrote most of it that day and then later on—”

“—We did some finishing touches,” O’Toole concluded.

“I remember — it was almost completed, and we had some errand to run out in Santa Monica. I just remember us in Santa Monica in the car, waiting for the kids or something, and coming up with the ‘tales of ancient glory’ verse.”

“Oh, that’s interesting,” O’Toole said slowly, “ ’cause I remember that differently. I remember doing the ‘tales of ancient glory’ standing at the piano. Well, maybe that was another part of it.”

They shrugged — or so it seemed, over the phone — and described the commonplace aspects of their collaboration. “We write a lot while we’re walking the dog,” McKean allowed.

“I write a lot walking in Stanley Park [in Vancouver],” said O’Toole. “It goes through my head — things will happen to me, and I’ll come home and call him. And he’ll of course be able to put it down. I can now play the mandolin well enough to work out a melody on it. So I can use that now.”

What they don’t have plans to do is record together. Although many actors have developed credible sidelines as musicians — the couple’s friend (and Bonnie Raitt’s ex) Michael O’Keefe being one — McKean is cognizant of the pitfalls.

“We’re kind of quote-unquote celebrities. And when an album comes out with two people who are known primarily not for singing, but for something else, William Shatner comes into our mind. And the rest of the cast of ‘Star Trek.’ It’s that ‘Is this a gimmick? Is this a novelty record? Is this Lorne Greene does Walt Whitman? What is this?’ ”

They are contemplating writing for other performers. “We have sent our songs out to different people,” said O’Toole.

McKean said: “We have a song that we wrote, and we were just kind of singing it for the third or fourth time, and we both had the same brainstorm: ‘Can you imagine Norah Jones doing this song? Oh, my God, she’d be great.’ Now about a million people are having that idea every day, because who wouldn’t want Norah Jones’ next album to have one of your songs on it? You’d be a millionaire. She’s this wonderful interpreter, and her last album sold a zillion copies, and the next one will, too. And it’s a great thing. But it’s a highly competitive thing, and all we can do is try. We’re still breaking this act in. It’s just two years down the line now.”

So they’ve gotten a publisher for their songs, they do the occasional small gig (no word yet on who’ll be performing “Rainbow” on the Oscar telecast), and when they’re not working on acting projects, they’re collaborating on a movie musical, with all original songs, about which their desire for secrecy only barely trumps their enthusiasm.

Songwriting, said O’Toole, is “almost like an acting exercise for me. Maybe that’s why I’m able to do it, because I’ve been acting so long. You just kind of put yourself in the emotional place of this person singing the song and it just seems to come out, melodically and lyrically. That’s just the way I think about it.”

McKean’s songwriting model is Hoagy Carmichael, whose composing method is similar to much of McKean’s comedy experience: “I think that he just had the best, the loosest idea of what a song is supposed to be. There’s this kind of a classical uniform for a lot of the other great songwriters, and they’re no less great for all that. Rodgers and Hart, and Hammerstein, and the Gershwins. There was a kind of formality to them. Whereas Carmichael had sort of this real loose kind of ‘I’m makin’ this up as I go along, but I couldn’t possibly be because it’s too perfect.’ So that’s what I always admired about him.”

Closer to the folk realm, O’Toole enthused about the Richard Thompson songs on the latest Del McCoury album, and McKean added: “I’m a firm believer in Richard Thompson as a source for almost anyone. I think he writes the best songs now. I think Richard and Elvis Costello and Loudon Wainwright have everybody else in the foyer, waiting to get in.”

“We’re in there!” said O’Toole excitedly. “We’re in the foyer!”

“We’re in the foyer!” her husband agreed, boldly.

O’Toole grew suddenly modest. “Well, you are, definitely. I’m still out in the street.”

Wasn’t That a Time?

After tackling community theater and dog shows in Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show, what led Christopher Guest to take on folk music? McKean said he’d heard Guest’s answer “about a thousand times”: “There is something about the earnestness with which people attack things that makes them sometimes amusing. And there’s no superiority in it — I think that A Mighty Wind is a very affectionate movie. Hopefully it comes across that way, because that’s exactly how it was meant. And even though Chris was a big folk-music fan, he was kind of more in the bluegrass pocket. And I was really into kind of the protest and the ‘we’re gonna change the world with this stuff’ attitude. But we both loved it and played it and really did it and lived it, to some extent.”

What distinguished the groups in the film wasn’t talent, or lack thereof: “The characters in this film are all kind of the commercial folkies. They’re all the ones who really had an eye on the chart rather than the prize, if you know what I mean.

“The most direct parallels with the Folksmen would be Kingston Trio or the Limeliters. Very talented people, good singers, and also good song hunters — they came up with great songs. The Limeliters probably had more of a sense of — they were more cabaret, and they would do a Flanders and Swann song like ‘Madeira, M’Dear,’ or other contemporary, deliberately funny songs. Kingston Trio, same thing — they did ‘Charlie on the MTA’ — which, by the way, is still the biggest-selling folk record.

“With Mitch & Mickey — Ian and Sylvia, I guess, Richard and Mimi Fariña, Jim and Jean. And again, Ian and Sylvia was a real folk act, quote-unquote. But they had commercial hits. And their relationship was kind of important. The New Main Street Singers, probably the most crassly commercial angle — the Serendipity Singers, Back Porch Majority. New Christy Minstrels, of course. The Randy Sparks army. It’s like, way too many people with way too many guitars and way too many smiles. It evolved into that kind of Up With People, the musical arm of the Republican Party kind of thing.

“So they all had this kind of more commercial slant. And that’s really what the parody is. It’s about regaining something that you lost. And, in the case of two of these acts, it’s really about ‘let’s get on the charts again.’ With Mitch & Mickey, or with Mitch specifically, it’s about ‘help me find my heart. Help me find my brain.’ There’s something about that act that’s got a little something more than just ‘let’s see if we can get on top again.’ ”

Loudon Wainwright III (Dirty Linen, 2002)

2006-08-22T22:20:00.000-07:00

From Dirty Linen #98, Feb/Mar 2002.

You know, sometimes I do more research than is economically feasible for a story. I probably could have done this one without going to New York City on October 13, 2001. But I'm glad I didn't.

Loudon Wainwright III

Real Live Man

by Pamela Murray Winters

In the middle of a sunny mid-Atlantic September, when the unthinkable happens, an interview with Loudon Wainwright III is one of many small things that goes awry. It’s scheduled, then rescheduled, then abbreviated, to be continued a month later, when things are somewhat saner.

“Like everybody else, I’m just trying to process what’s happened,” said Wainwright on September 18, shortly before leaving for some U.K. tour dates. He was at his home in Brooklyn Heights, New York, across the East River from Manhattan, talking by phone to an interviewer a few miles from the Pentagon, and he noted that we both had “plumes” to look at. “I’m not even thinking about how it relates to my job. I’m just trying to process it as a person who happens, in fact, to live incredibly close to where the World Trade towers were, and have people in New York who essentially are all okay. But I haven’t even thought about what it means to me as a songwriter. And it’s going to take awhile to process it, like everybody else.”

A week later, the man who has been called a New Dylan (by any number of critics), “one of the great lyricists of the age” (by Q magazine), and a “crapulous, self-pitying, philandering prick” (or at least wont to play that role, said music critic Robert Christgau) stood onstage at London’s Bloomsbury Theatre and sang about taking the subway into New York City a few days before:

When you are underwater
Sometimes the mind plays tricks
And there beneath the East River
It felt like the River Styx…
They say heaven’s high above us
And hell is far below
But in that subway tunnel
There was no sure way to know
— “No Sure Way”

After telling people that he wasn’t going to write a song about the terrorist attack, “because it was so immense,” he was surprised “to get an idea and actually write the song,” he told Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” in October. The song, “No Sure Way,” was met with warm acclaim at a show at New York’s Bottom Line on October 13, paired with his 1985 song “Hard Day on the Planet,” in which he complains: “I want to go on vacation till the pressure lets up/ But they keep hijacking planes and blowing them up.” A roomful of New Yorkers, many on their first outing since the catastrophe one month earlier and two miles south, joined in the “Planet” chorus. It wasn’t quite escapist entertainment; like the best of Wainwright’s work, it blended humor, pathos, and the uncomfortable recognition of our own spiritual blemishes.

“The best of Wainwright’s work” came to the forefront last September. First there was his recurring role in the new Fox sitcom “Undeclared,” in which he plays a lonely, somewhat pathetic father who follows his son to college. Within days of the TV premiere, Red House released his new album, Last Man on Earth. On this cohesive, often mournful work, Wainwright admits to middle-aged crankiness, gets all Freudian on Mom and Dad, reveals his plans for donating his organs, and laments enormous losses in the starkest of terms. Not for him the grand gesture, the massed choruses and operatic tableaux; he sits on a back porch, walks on a beach, gets up at 3 a.m. when nature calls.

“My mother died in 1997,” wrote Wainwright in the album’s liner notes, “and naturally my world fell apart. I was living in London... trying (sort of) to keep a sinking romantic relationship afloat.” Returning to Westchester County, New York, he moved into his mother’s cottage in Katonah and, for the next 18 months, “slept in her bed... used her lamps, linens, plates, mugs, pots and pans.” The album consists of snapshots of a man in mourning. The lost love is chronicled in “Bridge” (“in England a valentine is signed with a question mark”) and “Out of Reach” (“Today I’m gonna call you/ Just to prove that I still care/ But I’m so afraid you’ll answer/ That I hope you won’t be there.”) His late parents and living family are given a clear-eyed assessment in “Surviving Twin,” “White Winos,” and “Graveyard.”

Still, Last Man on Earth is far from gloomy. (Who but Wainwright, in the title song, would use estrangement from humanity as a pickup line?) Perhaps an artist with Wainwright’s curiosity and self-satisfied wit could have turned out some sort of noose-worthy killer of a disc, but he took care — and time — to create a fully realized vision, not merely a pity party.

“We had a whole year to work on this record, and that is unusual,” he explained. “Normally, my records, I cut ’em in two weeks and you take a week break and you mix ’em in five days and throw ’em out there. And then six months later you think, ‘God, why did I do that?’ And I think a lot of people make records that way, especially in, for want of a better use, the ‘folk music world.’ Because of the money element.”

Money wasn’t a problem with Last Man on Earth because one of its key players, producer Stewart Lerman (who also plays guitar, bass, keyboards, and percussion), owns New York’s Shinebox Studios, where the album was made. “The usual time and money constraints were somewhat suspended,” Wainwright noted. “We could work at a leisurely pace. And [Lerman’s] level of commitment was extremely high, as was [keyboardist] Dick Connette’s, who arranged a lot of the record.” Although other musicians, including David Mansfield, Steuart Smith, and Suzzy Roche, also contributed, the core team on Last Man on Earth comprised Wainwright, Lerman, and Connette.

“I’m very happy that we had the time and were able to do the record properly,” said Wainwright. “I’ve had a kind of checkered career in the recording studio. I’ve made a lot of different kinds of records, and some certainly more successful than others. And I don’t mean just in terms of units sold.”

With a career as long as Wainwright’s, one can forgive a few missteps. He released his eponymous first album in 1970, but it wasn’t until 1972’s Album III that he achieved AM radio immortality with “Dead Skunk.” (Penned in 15 minutes, “it certainly paid the bills for a long time,” Wainwright observed.) Over the ensuing three decades, he built a loyal fan base — in proportion to the population, he thinks, stronger in the U.K., his home for 12 years, than in the U.S. — released a string of albums, and became professionally and personally involved with such folk-rock families as the Roches, the McGarrigles, and the Thompsons.

Loudon Wainwright III was born in 1946. (His references to being “53 now” in “Living Alone” were already anachronistic by the time Last Man on Earth was released.) His own family was close to American gentry; Loudon Wainwright II was a writer for Life magazine, and his clan kept a house in Bedford, New York, in tony Westchester County. His parents divorced in the mid-70s. The familial stereotype has been chronicled in any number of American novels: witty, moneyed, repressed, lubricated.

Mother liked her white wine
she’d have a glass or three
And we’d sit out on the screen porch
white winos mom and me
We’d talk about her childhood
and recap my career
When we got to my father that was
when I’d switch to beer.

“As a kid, I listened to the music my parents were listening to,” said Wainwright. “So we listened to Guys and Dolls, South Pacific — show tunes. Broadway writers, which I loved. I loved that kind of writing — crisp, and in some cases, clever and funny writing. Then as a kid I got into Fats Domino and Elvis Presley records — I’m of that age that rock ’n’ roll was just coming along.

“When the folk music thing hit,” he said, as if it were influenza or Pearl Harbor, “in the early 60s, then I really identified with it. That would be the Newport Folk Festival, Pete Seeger, and all those people. And that crop of songwriters which is a little bit older than I am — and, of course, the crown prince of all that was Bob Dylan. But songwriters like Tom Paxton and Patrick Sky. And performers like Dave Van Ronk, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Geoffrey Muldaur. I loved all that stuff. I hitchhiked to the Newport Folk Festival. I bought my first Martin dreadnought guitar. I identified more with that than the rock ’n’ roll stuff that was also going on.

“I recognized that a lot of the stars of that era, like Dylan, were like myself. They were middle class, or even upper-middle class, white kids, who wore work boots and denim shirts. I mean, even Pete Seeger comes from a kind of patrician background. And having grown up in northern Westchester, I recognized right away that this was something that I could emulate. Although at the time I didn’t think I would be a musician; I thought I was going to be an actor. I went to acting school [at Carnegie Mellon]; I didn’t really start writing songs until later. But when I was 13 and 14 and playing the guitar and hitchhiking to the Newport Folk Festival, I was just a fan of those people. And then when I built my identity up as a songwriter, I was confident in the knowledge that these guys had gone before me, and it was a possibility.”

The post-“Skunk” years saw Wainwright combining a peck of acting with a bushel of music. He slipped into other roles in Broadway’s Pump Boys and Dinettes and as Captain Spaulding in several episodes of “M*A*S*H.” He showed up on film in 28 Days, Jacknife, and The Slugger’s Wife. But onstage with his guitar and in the studio, he portrayed a flawed, confused, and even mean-spirited man: a neglectful father, a faithless lover, a defensive aging male WASP. “April Fool’s Day Morn” on 1987’s Fame and Wealth took him through a night of debauchery culminating in the comfort of his mother, who fixed him breakfast.

Still, Loudon the softy doesn’t get nearly as much attention as Loudon the lout. Fame and Wealth, one of a string of mid-80s albums, offers a sweet birthday song to daughter Martha on “Five Years Old.” Among Loudon’s topical songs, many of them commissioned by National Public Radio, “Tonya’s Twirls” is a surprisingly sympathetic look at the working-class skater Tonya Harding.Taken out of context, much of Last Man on Earth could be dangerously Hallmarkian. “Future Fossils” takes on the well-worn imagery of footprints in the sand; “I’m Not Gonna Cry” is a lightweight banjo romp through tear-stained metaphors (“Well it looks like rain and I hear a train”). And “Homeless” is a simply worded depiction of the loss of his “best friend,” his mother.

Disassembling Wainwright, in fact, reveals that the artist is more than the sum of his parts. He seldom traffics in complex phrases. His work reveals a dependence on the classic ballad form and its A/B/A/B rhyme scheme. Descriptions of his work fall short of its emotional and aesthetic impact. How does he manage, then, to create such powerful and touching songs?

“Navel gazing is a just criticism among songwriters,” said Bob Feldman, whose Red House Records had a one-album deal with Wainwright for Last Man on Earth. “Loudon has perfected it to a craft. He’s deeper and more committed. He has us in mind when he does this, and I think that’s why he resonates... For a man to bare his soul like that, it’s a very generous type of writing.

“I don’t think there’s anyone writing about us the way he is,” Feldman went on. “He’s so brave and honest, it’s shocking at times, and yet it’s like looking in a mirror — at the parts you don’t want to see.”

Wainwright thinks before he creates, but the result doesn’t come off as calculated, just emotionally acute. About his song on the events of September 11, Feldman noted that “Loudon would have been the last person in the world to write a song that would have been exploitive.”

Age has been a gift to Wainwright. His keen eye has served him well as a topical writer; people who don’t know him from “Dead Skunk” might recall his excoriation of North Carolina Senator/Puritan Jesse Helms in “Jesse Don’t Like It.” And in middle age he's gaining new fans in a way that was impossible when he was a young troubadour: as a father, both in real life and on television. Daughter Martha and son Rufus, whose mother is Kate McGarrigle, are both forging musical careers; Rufus, who has recorded two acclaimed albums and has shared bills with Tori Amos and Elton John, has a particularly high profile. Wainwright maintains he’s proud of his children and even says, of the elegant meditation “Bed” on Last Man on Earth, “When I hear it, I think it’s influenced by Rufus Wainwright! Just melodically. Obviously I listen to his stuff. I don’t listen to a lot of contemporary music; I’ve always made a point of not doing that. But I think I’ve listened to too much Rufus Wainwright, because the song ‘Bed’ seems to be very influenced by him.”

“My father, though he was never around, would always come by at extremely opportune moments and lend me some perspective,” said Rufus in a 1998 interview. His father also helped Rufus get a contract with Dreamworks by passing along a tape of his music to Van Dyke Parks.

But then again, he immortalized his infant son in 1974’s “Rufus is a Tit Man,” and songs like “I Wish I Was a Lesbian” and “The Untitled” (about a homoerotic romp by the Hardy Boys) probably don’t sit well with the adult Rufus, who is gay.

“I certainly have embarrassed my kids, infuriated them,” the elder Wainwright acknowledged. (Or, in “Me and All the Other Mothers”: “But most fathers are really like winos and weirdos/ In the long run, they always screw up.”) “But that’s certainly an aspect of being a dad.” Asked, “Children need parents; do parents need children?” he was momentarily baffled, then said, “I dunno. I suppose some do. I did.”

It’s certainly true of Hal Karp, the character he portrays in “Undeclared,” who shows up at his freshman son’s college after breaking up with his wife and is soon attending dorm parties and draining kegs. “Judd Apatow, the creator of the show, was a fan of my music and had seen my shows,” Wainwright explained. “I of course didn’t know this. And he just decided that the show needed a father figure, and I guess it occurred to him that I might be able to fit that bill. So he tracked me down. I hadn’t seen any of his work, but then they sent me some tapes of ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ his previous show, which I was very impressed with. So I said yes, certainly, I’d be happy to audition. And, happily, I got the job.

“It’s a very good show,” said Wainwright of “Undeclared,” which will be back for its second season this fall. In describing the series, he could be describing much of his own repertoire: “It’s silly, but in the best sense of the word. It’s not stupid. The writing’s very good. There’s no laugh track. There’s a lot of surprises in it; things twist and turn. The actors are all terrific. I’m very happy to be part of it.

“I suppose they could fire me at any point,” he offered. “But they seem to be happy with what I’ve done.” To a colleague’s assertion that he’s “playing himself” in the show, he said, “I’m playing myself — but worse. Or better. I don’t know which.”

“There are some new converts” to his music, Wainwright observed of recent shows. “Younger people are coming. That could be anything from the ‘Undeclared’ thing to parental indoctrination to I’m the dad of Rufus Wainwright. There could be all kinds of reasons for that. All of a sudden, if I’m signing CDs, I’ll look up and there’s a 22-year-old there. Which is, of course, delightful.

“It’s a critical time, touring at the age of 55 and getting the best reviews he’s ever gotten,” Feldman said of Wainwright’s recent successes. “I just hope he keeps on doing what he’s doing. It’s totally up to him what he’s doing. With an artist like Loudon, you don’t have to bring a lot to the table.” As he went on, he sounded like a school guidance counselor, or as if he were talking about a developing artist — which, in a way, he was. “I would like to work with him to help him realize his goals. I love what he’s doing with his acting career. He’s also talked about doing a one-man show that would run in different cities.” Feldman, who first saw Wainwright in the mid-80s, is optimistic about the future of Wainwright the performer: “He’s developed into an incredible showman.”

To critic David Handelsman’s assertion that “Mr. Wainwright is one of the few artists who has actually gotten better as he’s gotten older,” Wainwright commented, “That’s ideally what should happen: your experience and your…” Trailing off, he switched to a jokey voice: “Like the finest wines and cheeses! Certainly there are cases where people don’t get better, but I think there are plenty of examples of people continuing to do good work as they get older. And there’s no reason why that can’t be true with musicians and songwriters.”

Talking with Wainwright reveals a shrewd, mature character who, while unafraid to sing about his vulnerability and even his least appealing qualities, is far too solid to drown in his own miseries. Again and again, he speaks of his “job” and the structural underpinnings of his art. Is it difficult to sing about bitterness toward his father (“I learned I had to fight him/ My own flesh blood bone and kin”), reliving old family miseries with his mother over a few glasses of Chardonnay, or the naked mourning of “Homeless”?

Now I’m smoking again
I thought all that was through
And I don’t want to live
But what else can I do?
And I feel like I’ve faked
All that I ever did
And I’ve grown a gray beard
But I cry like a kid

“I write the songs to be sung,” said Wainwright simply. “It’s not as if I’m writing for some other singers to sing them. And the songs are meant to be performed, and they’re gauged and crafted to elicit some kind of a response. Which is not to say that I’m cynical about it. I understand the job at hand for me, which is to engage and affect an audience for 75 minutes or 90 minutes — or, if it’s a CD, 38 minutes or 40 minutes or however long. So the set’s arranged, and the songs are built to make people laugh, to make them think, or to bring them back somewhere and affect them in an emotional way. So I’m gratified when something like that happens. And it’s not difficult — it’s not torturous for me. Although, in the case of the World Trade Center [song] or “Homeless” or some of the kind of serious material, it might seem that it would be hard to sing the songs. But it’s not, really.

“It’s a show. There’s lights, and I’ve got a microphone, and there’s 300 of you out there, or however many it is — 3,000, or 50. And there’s me on the stage, with a guitar. So it’s an unreal situation to begin with. But that’s the business of being a performer. That’s the business of show business, in a sense. And that’s what I wanted to do. I always loved — as an audience member, I thought that was a magical thing, when a performer or group of performers could lift the room up, even for three minutes in a song. And that’s why I wanted to do this job to begin with. Again, it’s a show and it’s an act and there’s performing involved, but it’s bigger and better than that. It’s a beautiful thing when it happens.”

And about the inner work of song craft: “I don’t know that it cures anything or is therapeutic. You never get over the death of your parents. My dad died 13 years ago, and I’m still trying to work that out in song, and ‘Surviving Twin’ is an example of that. And I suspect I’ll be writing about my mother in 10 years’ time if I’m still writing. So you don’t get over these people or their loss. I do think, though, that in a way, writing a song or an article or painting a picture or making a film... it doesn’t offer a kind of closure, but it does, in a sense, empower you, just to try to articulate, on film or in a song or on paper or on a canvas, your feelings and thoughts about these people or these big events. That’s one of the reasons that I do this. That’s one of the reasons that I’m a songwriter. By making this stuff, in my case songs, and then performing them, it gives me at least the illusion of feeling powerful. But again, in the best sense of the word, of sharing something with other people.”

We may not always like what we share with the very human being portrayed in Wainwright’s songs, but in his hands our common experience can be frightening, funny, and mentally stimulating — nourishment to keep us growing.

A Dave Carter remembrance

2006-08-22T21:50:00.000-07:00

This is one of the few things in my blog that is not reproduced in its published form. I wrote it, all of a piece--very little editing; I'm a first-draft kind of gal whenever possible--withing 48 hours of Dave's death, if I recall correctly. I shopped it around to a few publications, feeling both like I wanted my say and like I was being a bit of a ghoul, and it ended up in the Dirty Linen news column, though it was edited. Since I really wanted my ending back in, I'm putting my original version up on this site.

Dave would have been 54 on Aug. 13.

Dave Carter’s hair was out of control. A year ago, his musical partner Tracy Grammer had joked to me that their burgeoning musical career was “a little frazzling right now, just ‘cause it’s all sort of overwhelming. You can see it in Dave’s hair.” She laughed as she pointed at his frizzy, near-Lovett mane. “You want to know how we’re doing? Just check out the hair.”

On Wednesday night, at Jammin’ Java in Vienna, the hair was a sagging mushroom, a white man’s ‘fro. “He reminds me of someone I saw on TV, when I was a kid,” a neighbor mused. I tried to remember which one was the Monkee with the hat—Micky Dolenz, or Mike Nesmith? Dave was the Monkee without the hat.

He’d probably just not had time to see a barber. He and Tracy had been touring almost constantly since the 2001 release of drum hat buddha, both as a duo and as featured players in Joan Baez’s band. He expected to make some time soon, to slow down.

The Vienna show turned out to be their last. Afterward, the couple went to Massachusetts to prepare for Saturday’s Green River Folk Festival in Greenfield. Dave went out for a run on Friday morning and died of a heart attack at noon. He was a few weeks shy of his 50^th birthday.

There were no specters of death in Dave Carter’s life: no excessive lifestyles (Dave once told me, “A lot of people would say that casually lighting up a joint every few hours is like walking in and out of the spirit's house without knocking, much less calling to say you're coming: You can have every expectation that he will take umbrage”), no personal dramas, no risky air travel. Nothing wilder in their lives than that hair.

On Wednesday, my friend and I got to Jammin’ Java late. Fortunately for us, the show was late as well. Dave and Tracy, on the few occasions when I saw them, spent a lot of time, onstage and off, conferring over nitpicky details. Tracy was a perfectionist. Dave was…well, Dave was Dave: avowedly mystical, a trickster serious to the core, someone with his fuzzy head always up in dreams.

When I first met them, at an interview last year for Dirty Linen magazine, I was struck by their complementary natures. Tracy, with affection and no trace of malice, could poke, without skewering, those clouds that seemed to emanate from Dave’s lofty brow. Even Dave often prefaced his statements by “This is going to sound a little weird, but…” Tracy was the one who talked about the fun of singing karaoke, her fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan. I’ve never met another folk musician who loved studio work like Tracy, who was classically trained—a violinist, really, not a fiddler—and who used her theatrical experience to add polish to the performance. She was—she is—firmly grounded, deeply talented, and seemingly utterly willing to live in Dave’s cloud-cuckooland without it engulfing and smothering her. He needed her as much as she needed him.

He was a creditable guitarist and banjo player and a better singer than he ever realized, but a truly gifted songwriter, adept at both melody and lyric. He was also a master salesman, though it’s not the first term you’d think of to apply to him. He created his own myth—“the Carlos Castaneda of American music”—both by what wrote and by how he presented himself.

At Wednesday’s show, I became antsy around the fourth time Dave introduced a song by saying, “This one came from this dream I had….” My exasperation was born of jealousy: What writer doesn’t want to be on God’s direct-mail list? The interview we began last summer had spun off into a few e-mail exchanges in which I found myself doing less interviewing and more wisdom-seeking. I let the discussion drop, believing that this wasn’t the setting to learn what Dave might have to teach.

I asked him, in one of those late e-mails, about his Chinese zodiac sign. An old press kit had revealed that Tracy was an “earth monkey.” Dave replied: “Tracy knows the answer to this one, too (I'd ask her this stuff but she's in Oregon and I'm in Colorado right now). I know I was born in a dragon year, but I don't remember what element. I think it might be fire, but maybe I just like the sound of ‘fire dragon.’"

It looks like Dave was a water dragon. His birthdate was in his obituary: He was born Aug. 13, 1952. He came of age in Texas and Oklahoma, the child of an evangelist and a mathematician. He attended the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. He and his cello once hitched a ride from Merle Haggard. He taught English at the University of Oklahoma, to athletes—as he put it in his concert banter the other night, “English as a second language.” He settled in Portland, Oregon, playing in local bands and developing a legendary presence at open mikes. He claimed to have gotten serious about music after a vision of his dead grandmother. When he met Tracy in 1996, he found his cosmic twin. When I Go, recorded in Tracy’s kitchen, was released in 1998. Tanglewood Tree, which brought a signing to the prestigious acoustic label Signature Sounds, followed in 2000, and drum hat buddha in 2001. It was an astonishing trajectory, each album equally creative and successively more self-assured.

At Wednesday night’s show, Tracy explained that each of their albums had a “color scheme.” She saw the next one as blue and gold. The title was to be “The Moon and Seven,” but she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell us what that meant. She spoke with us after the show about how she and Dave would be making some time in September to work on songs for the new album: “Dave can’t write on the road.” She said they’d be back our way in October to play at the Birchmere, where they’d last appeared with Baez.

We caught up with Dave on our way out. When one of us mentioned the Baez show, he told us of a joke he wished he’d made there. Joan had called the Reagan era “a great vacuum”; he said, “I should have said ‘No, the great vacuum was in the Hoover administration!’” He laughed broadly, a little self-deprecatingly.

“See you in October,” I said, as we waved goodbye. He turned his long-boned body toward the stage area, toward Tracy, and walked away.

Pamela Murray Winters
July 21, 2002

Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer (late 2001)

2006-08-22T21:23:00.000-07:00

A story from Dirty Linen magazine #97 (Dec '01/Jan '02).

Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer

Karaoke & Confucius

by Pamela Murray Winters

It starts with dreams.

“Most of the beginnings of my songs come in dreams, or in a waking state that is very similar to a dream state,” mused Dave Carter. “That is, I wouldn’t want to be driving when I was in this state.” He was cocooned in an air-conditioned trailer with his musical partner, Tracy Grammer, while outside in the Philadelphia summer heat the WXPN Singer/Songwriter Festival got underway. Rangy, sort of a beardless Lincoln, with deceptively simple lines to his face, he struggled to translate this inspiration: “And I will hear, just out of the blue…almost…not that I hear voices!”

He flashed a slightly abashed smile and continued. “I will imagine a certain turn of phrase which, for me, has great meaning. And I will hear the basic little musical part that goes with it. So the motif, both lyrically and musically, will hit me at once. Very often, it’ll be like I dream it, but a lot of times I’ll just hear it.

“And from there, I think about the crux of the meaning of that phrase, both lyrically and why it sounds good to me with that music. So that I understand the motivation, in part, for grasping onto that lyric. And from there I work.”

Next move: hit the pedals. “One way I have of [working] is, if I have time, I’ll get on a bicycle, and I’ll ride the bicycle for, like, 20 miles. And I let my pedaling fall into the rhythm of this turn of phrase. And at the end of it I’ll have sheets and sheets and sheets and sheets of lyrics from which I will pare down the stuff… I just pare it all down so I can get it into a song. Some songs I feel call, aesthetically, for a whole gob of lyrics. Like [Dylan’s] ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.’ There’s a song that would not be right unless it had about a hundred verses.

“Chuang-Tzu tells this story, about this woodcutter, and he’s supposed to be a great sculptor. What he would do was go out into the forest, and he would find the particular piece of wood, the particular stone, and he knew that inside the stone was this shape he would see. So depending on whether I get a stone, or a log, or what the stone’s made out of, or maybe it’s just a dirt clod, that depends on how much paring down that’s gonna be. But you have to start by bringing in the whole uncut block.”

Carter’s is not the only voice that interprets his lyrics. Asked whether there are differences between “Dave songs” and “Tracy songs,” his partner on the sofa, a bird-boned woman with arresting green eyes, shrugged: “He puts more words in my songs!”

Tracy Grammer, too, knows something about dreams. “When I was in the third grade and fifth grade, I got parts in operettas at my elementary school. And in one, I was the modern major general, and in the other, I was the Duke of Plaza-Toro. I don’t know why I got these boys’ parts! I think it was because at that time I had a loud and booming voice relative to all the other kids, and also because I was kind of a stage hog all the time. I was fearless! I would just get out there with my feather in my cap, and my knickers on, and just strut around and do anything. And also I could memorize a lot of lines.”

She tossed off a snippet of classic Gilbert and Sullivan in a clear, earnest voice. “When I think about those parts that I got — the wordplay and the density of the lyrics — it so goes with what I’m doing now.

“I always wanted to sing in the musicals in high school but never got to.” Instead, she played violin in the pit orchestra, returning to singing only after college at Berkeley. “Really, I got my start as a public singer in a karaoke bar in Modesto, California.” Carter’s eyes were closed, and a long-suffering smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as Grammer continued: “My brother and I would go to a place called the Early Dawn, which was right down the street from where we were living, very convenient. And every Sunday night they had karaoke night… I would sing ‘Love is Alive’ by the Judds. And there was a guy named Marshall there, and we would sing ‘Up Where We Belong’ by Joe Cocker—”

Carter murmured, “Are there any more nails you can hammer into the coffin of our reputation?”

Grammer replied impishly, “I haven’t even mentioned John Denver yet! But, yeah, so I started singing this karaoke, and I just loved it. And I even won a prize! I won a free dinner for my karaoke singing.”

Around that time, she also met Curtis Coleman, a former member of the New Christy Minstrels, and started attending his gigs. “At some point he got me up on stage, and I remember that first time so clearly — it was terrible. I opened my mouth to sing, and it was just something else altogether that came out. It was this noise that I had no control over at all. I was just totally gone with nervousness. But we did it over and over all through the summer, four nights a week, and I eventually got more comfortable up there, and started to figure out how it all worked. And after that I was just hopeless, you know?”

Elsewhere on the map, Carter was building a reputation in the Portland, Oregon, music scene. Raised in Oklahoma and Texas, he studied at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California, where the son of a charismatic Christian mother and an engineer father explored the mysteries of consciousness. (From the school’s website: “The proper role of the personality is to be a translucent window, a servant to divinity within.”) A vision of his dead grandmother sent him from Portland to Nashville in 1995, where he worked the open mikes. He was already a legend in Portland by the day in February 1996 when Tracy Grammer and a friend came to perform at a songwriters’ night at the Buffalo Gap Saloon.

“I had just moved to Portland maybe a month earlier and didn’t know anything about the scene,” Grammer recalled. “I showed up, played violin, hung around, heard lots of good songwriters. And then Dave Carter comes in at the end of the night. He’s been working all day, and he’s all flustered, and he’s kinda running through the audience and everybody’s like ‘Dave Carter’s here! Dave Carter’s here! Shhh!’ ”

Her partner said, “You gotta hear this guy.” Grammer, figuring the rest of the evening’s performers had been pretty good, decided to take notice.

“I had moved to Portland from Berkeley, and my literature studies took me into Native American Lit — that was my focus. And I also had a minor in anthropology.” Carter, with his then-partner, “started to sing this song which had lots of Native American imagery. He was singing with a bit of a twang, and I had grown up on country music, so I was attracted to this.

“And he was so humble. And just — I don’t know, just so not full of himself onstage that I was immediately drawn in. But mostly for the poetry and the twang mixed together. I was just really blown away. And I had one of these moments where everybody else in the room disappeared, and I just focused on this guy.

“It wasn’t so much about ‘this guy,’ ” Grammer clarified. “I knew what I would be doing. I just had this total epiphany and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s the kind of music I want to play.’ ”

Grammer ran into Carter after the show. He spotted her violin case and said “Hey, let’s play music sometime.” She agreed — “which was unlike me, because I was shy, and scared I couldn’t do it, and kinda insecure about whatever talent I had or didn’t have. But I agreed to do it. My better angel said, ‘You better say yes.’ ”

Carter had a five-piece band at the time. “The first time I heard her play, when she came on the first day to play with the band, I knew that everybody else was going away eventually,” Carter mused. After Grammer joined, the band became a sort of musical tontine: “People started having kids and building houses and getting other jobs, and everybody just left. And Tracy and I were the only people left who had nowhere left to go.”

It was 1998 when they emerged as a duo. And emerge they did, like Athena springing full-grown from her dad’s brow. That year, “We entered and won song contests at Kerrville New Folk, Napa Valley, and Wildflower,” Grammer said. They recorded their first album, When I Go, in Grammer’s kitchen. By the time Tanglewood Tree came out in 2000, they were already the source of buzz among fans of modern folk music.

No, wait — make that “postmodern mythic American folk music,” the best tag line they’ve created to describe a music that is at once fundamentally simple and unerringly transcendent. There’s a familiarity in the downhome harmonies, and Carter’s compositions tend to sound like newly mined traditional songs — studded with dry humor, proper-name references from Merlin to Elvis, and mind-bending turns of phrase:

When they hear my bowstrings tight’nin
Angels gay and devils fright’nin
Come on fire and midnight lightnin
To the garden gancy

Hail the wayward werewolf howlin
Haints and shades and goblins growlin
Fiends and demon deevs prowlin
When I break and fancy

“If you have a dream, every little thing that happens in that dream has an immense amount of significance,” Carter explained. “So if you truly, carefully, and accurately translate that up into something cognitive, like lyrics, then, in spite of your best efforts, it’s going to be dense.” So does he walk around in a daze, constantly muttering his transmissions from the great unknown into a pocket-sized Sony? “After you do a lot of dream work, you get to where you can remember your dreams easily, and after you do a lot of music, you get to where you learn melodies and harmonies very easily. This is harder than it might sound, especially the music part. It actually involves physical development of the brain in specialized ways.”

Grammer notes that a new travel-sized guitar means that “we can work on music in the van now, which is nice… he can be playing over and over again and getting into a sort of meditative state, or whatever state is required to write songs.” An intensive tour schedule, including upcoming dates in support of Joan Baez, keeps them in the van a lot. “We basically are playing at every house in America, I’m pretty sure,” Carter deadpanned.

They also practice in the van, though Carter said they don’t spend a lot of time practicing. Grammer described their arrangements as “totally intuitive.” They listen to a wide range of music — certainly country and classical, but also such unexpected styles as opera and hip-hop. What they hear is filtered into their arrangements. Carter, who plays guitar and banjo as well as singing harmony and lead vocals, is especially impressed by Grammer’s musical sensibility. Of Grammer, who plays violin and mandolin along with vocals, Carter said, “What I really love about Tracy’s music, and the way that Tracy plays — it’s all about interpretation and what’s appropriate. The jazz pianist Bill Evans, that’s the person whom I compare Tracy’s folk/singer/songwriter violin playing to, because she doesn’t get out there and do much hotdogging.”

Grammer, in keeping with her personality (in the Chinese zodiac, she’s an “earth monkey”), cited a mundane influence for her style of playing. “In high school, I did a series of four musicals. And although I always wanted to be onstage, singing the songs and acting the parts, because we had a small orchestra at my school, I was stuck in the pit. Being in the pit, and watching the action onstage, and considering exactly when you were going to start those notes, how loud you were going to be and support that singer… that’s exactly my approach, a very musicals-oriented approach, where I’m just trying to perpetuate what’s happening in the song and not just jump out and say ‘And Tracy Grammer, Violin!’

“I don’t care if I only play one note on the violin. If that’s the right note for that song, that’s all I’m gonna do.”

“Her violin is over 200 years old,” Carter mused, “and it was smashed at one time and put back together. And there’s a sadness and sorrow and pain and depth of knowledge and sensibility to Tracy’s playing and to the sound that comes out of that violin. And that’s because the violin itself has gone through death and resurrection. And there’s a wisdom there in that all the pain and sensitivity Tracy carries; there’s a resonance between that and the violin that she plays such that she gets this amazing variety of heartrending tone out of the thing. I really think there’s nobody else like her in the world.”

A potent yet strange combination of forces, from Taoism to karaoke, brought Carter and Grammer together to conceive their heavenly-and-earthly music. These forces are represented, in a way, by the title of their latest album, drum hat buddha. Carter explained that the title came from continuing attempts to explain the kind of music they make. “I thought, wouldn’t it be better if we could just present three images [so] that maybe people could get a certain gestalt about what it is that we’re trying to do. So we have the shaman’s drum, which I feel like relates to the heartbeat and trance states. Also to the body — also the Native American influences and the old Celtic influences. And the cowboy hat has that Texas thing going on. It also relates to the head and mind. And then we are hoping that within our work, all the time, there’s this transcendental principle running through the whole thing, which would be symbolized by the buddha.”

“It also happened that we have each of those three items in our house,” Grammer added. “ ’Cause Dave made the shaman’s drum that’s on the cover, and that’s his cowboy hat — I’ve never seen him wear it — and his little buddha. There was a joke for a while that we were going to call the album ‘Dave’s Favorite Things.’ But we think drum hat buddha is better.”

Carter picked up the CD. “This was Tracy’s idea.” Under the disc, the three elements are combined into a sort of mandala.

“It was my idea,” Grammer acknowledged, “but our graphic designer [Thorin Nielson] just did a fabulous job. I’ve never met anybody who totally gets what we’re doing and can represent it visually so well.”

Here are two people who appreciate beauty, especially when it radiates through the concrete. Before I could even ask a favorite question — is creativity a necessity in life? — Carter chose the same topic. Perhaps it was in response to the suggestion that the world is full of singer/songwriters, most of whom don’t have the gifts these two have.

“The real message of Confucius,” Carter began, and then uttered a nervous laugh, as if fearing he’d come off like some kind of a pompous freak — “which people don’t understand, is that the basis of education in society should be poetry. His fundamental thing was that society should be structured on poetry. Poetry is the source from which all real knowledge springs. That is our gateway to understanding. In that sense, I’m really a Confucian. I would just like to see everybody do this. But of course I come from kind of a biased point of view.

“But you know, some people would say, ‘Look, who cares about poetry? We need to build a bridge.’ But you know, if you can’t see poetry in the bridge, you’re gonna have a nation with these really gnarly-looking bridges that are not oriented towards human beings. And we’ve known this now in architecture for 30 or 40 years. Architecture now is less about steel and glass and structural hierarchical functions and more about making the city human. I just think that this principle translates to just about everything there is.”

“Portland is a great example of a city that practices this,” Grammer chimed in, about the couple’s home town. “Portland is really hell bent on preservation and making sure things fit in. Everything you do makes sense as part of the whole.” This is true, Grammer says, not only of the city’s architecture, but also of its acceptance of artists. “It’s not just like you’re this part that’s out here, doing this strange thing that nobody else understands. Art is everywhere.”

Like the city they call home, Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer prove that authenticity and dreams can walk hand in hand.

Dave Carter on Feeding Your Head

Curious about the emphasis on altered consciousness in Dave Carter’s comments, I asked him: “What do you think about the use of mind-altering substances or methods — meditation, marijuana, peyote, prayer, prolonged periods of staying awake, etc. — in relationship to your songwriting?”

He addressed the topic readily, and with his usual blend of spiritual reaching and common sense.

“It’s important to say something about addictions at this point. I’ll just say this, and rational people can criticize me all they want. Still, I stand by the truth of the following irrational words: A substance like peyote or hemp is the doorway to the house of a particular spirit. This spirit can show you many visions and truths. But if you enter his house too often, or with few defenses, he will make you a prisoner there. He may also wound you during your stay.” He noted that he was using male pronouns for convenience’s sake.

“Visions you find on your own are harder won, but they are equally potent and they are yours. Shamanic work (and this includes deep songwriting) is perilous enough as it is. I would add that, if one does choose to traffic with these spirits, one should approach the substance involved with reverence. A lot of people would say that casually lighting up a joint every few hours is like walking in and out of the spirit’s house without knocking, much less calling to say you’re coming. You can have every expectation that he will take umbrage at this.

“So, I don’t use any mind-altering substances at all. That includes alcohol and tobacco. However, let me add that for a very few people, the ritual use of some of these substances may be appropriate, and the idea of someone being incarcerated because they're in possession of the “wrong” plant (particularly hemp) is abominable to me. That said, I personally don’t want to play around with my brain cells or my ability to focus. I have found myself perfectly capable of vision without using substances. I do meditate and pray. I keep a dream journal sometimes, and I often go without sleep. There are a number of other methods for achieving different states of consciousness, and I practice many of those.”

Zoe Mulford (Washington Post)

2006-08-18T16:09:00.000-07:00

From today's Weekend section of the Washington Post (Aug. 18, 2006).

ZOE MULFORD "Roadside Saints" Azalea City

HERE'S THE ZOE Mulford formula: Isolate an idea -- say that soup stock is a metaphor for both the lifecycle and the creative process or that kids grow up or that you are the colors you wear. Then bring American folk-music culture -- with a goodly emphasis on the cheery offerings of the seminal book "Rise Up Singing" -- to bear on its development into a perfectly crafted song.

It's not that Mulford is formulaic; her songs benefit from the familiarity of their structures and melodies, and from Mulford's somewhat everyday voice, and if they don't offer earthshaking insights, they present eternal beliefs in a lively and pretty way.

"Our Lady of the Highways," which might as well have been the title track of "Roadside Saints," offers a meditation on a well-known statue that overlooks Interstate 95 on the way to Delaware: "Blessed be the children and the strangers / We are all together, we are all alone." Its sweet country harmonies are perfectly suited to its contemplative mood.

Mulford isn't the least bit credible as an irreverent Irish emigrant in "The American Wake," but she delivers her sprightly lyrics with an appealing lilt. Like the makers of "Stock" ("Open your mind up, see what you've got / Haul it on out before it starts to rot"), she does the best she can with what she has.

"Roadside Saints" does offer some tiny surprises, most of which come courtesy of producer John Jennings. His electric guitar and Rosie Shipley's violin sometimes cut through the songs like sudden, small alterations in the weather -- just enough of a change in the light to remind the listener how enjoyable this timeless sort of music can be when it's done not only sincerely but well.

-- Pamela Murray Winters

Sloan Wainwright (Dirty Linen, late 1997)

2006-08-18T16:03:00.000-07:00

A reference near the end to "blooming" meals will make more sense if you know that the lunch we had at the cafe had edible flowers in the salad. That part got edited out.

I hate the title. I hate the lede. I probably will hate the article, when I reread it. But I love Sloan, so here it is.

From Dirty Linen #73 (Dec '97/Jan '98)

Sloan Wainwright
No Thinking Too Much!

by Pamela Murray Winters

Can you have it all? And if you had it all, where would you put it?

Sloan Wainwright’s treasures are in Katonah, New York. It’s the area where she was raised and where much of her family still lives. (Brother Loudon visits when he can.) It’s the home of the Bakers Cafe, which she runs with her sister. It’s where her husband, too, was born, and where the couple lives with their two sons. And it’s where the roots of her creativity and her personality run deep.

Wainwright had a classic baby-boomer childhood, with an artistic twist. “We had a great piano in the TV room, and I would come home from school and play piano and watch TV concurrently and sing little songs about what had happened in school that day... I was one of those kids who loved to listen to show tunes and get up and act them out.”

When you take your show out of the living room and onto the road, sometimes things change, as the young Wainwright discovered performing original songs in New York folk clubs. “I had a very hard time dealing with the scene. I was young, and I was perhaps not motivated enough, didn’t want it bad enough to just continue forward. I was oversensitive... it was very hard for me to deal with criticism.”

For a time she turned to traditional music, finding that it was easier to express herself without the burden of that personal connection to the songs. (She said old-timey music also suited her “pounding” piano style.)

She’s still a closet trad player, though she won’t bring out the banjo onstage. “It was refreshing and renewing, and it was detached from my whole sort of personal expression — even though what it really did was bring up a whole new bunch of stuff for me. But I wasn’t singing words about what I was feeling or what I was seeing.”

Meanwhile, she was getting married, having children, and working at the Bakers Cafe, where lunch is a treat for the senses. So how did Sloan Wainwright find her way back to the stage and to the studio?

“I was involved in a local production company,” she said, “and we were doing original children’s theater with original music...and what started happening was that these shows had to be performed. And that was how I squeaked back onstage. That was about 14 years ago.” She never stopped writing songs, and as she found that her earlier hypersensitivity had faded, she returned to performing her own compositions. Sloan Wainwright was released in 1996 on Waterbug, and a new album, tentatively titled From Where You Are, is due this spring.

Working with a strong band — “Even though I write the songs and sing the songs, the individual personalities of the group come through” — has probably led to some of her success on the adult album alternative market.

Her sound combines folk, rock, jazz, and funk in a way that fans of Joni Mitchell and Joan Armatrading will recognize. She hopes that her new album will include more of the solo work that once frightened her off the stage.

The power of her voice and her imagination makes it sound like she’s never stopped singing. Anne Saunders of Falcon Ridge Productions said, “Her range must be close to five octaves and starts somewhere down where only trees and other elemental beings of the earth can hear.”

Thus, the origin of “On a Windy Day” (from her self-titled album) seems appropriate. “It was a little assignment I gave myself to write a song from the perspective of a squirrel. Now at a show I would never tell anybody that before I sang the song — it would ruin it! And it’s about death and renewal... but the original idea was I was sitting there and playing, and I was looking out the window and going ‘A squirrel!’ ”

She seems like the earth mother so many of us want to be, but when asked, “What’s it like being a superwoman?” she recoiled, laughing, protesting. “There’s a part of me that feels a little shy about ‘Sloan: mother, wife, baker, business owner, musician...’ ” Sometimes she worries about how it looks to outsiders. “My biggest fear is of being a dilettante — being a doer of many things and not really very good at any of them.”

Deep down, where it counts, she knows that it’s all part of the same creation. There’s an organic unity to her life that pleases her. As the Bakers Cafe serves up blooming meals and her sons reach maturity, Wainwright feels the nourishment of her roots and rejoices in fruition. “The creative expression is always there.” Waving her hand across the sunny table, she continued. “I did it here — expressed myself through this place, expressed myself through my children. And now I can stand on a stage and sing, which is really what I’ve been waiting for, saying what I want to say. I’ve been waiting. And if I think too much about it, I get scared — I think, ‘Is it too late?’ I hope not!

“If I think too much... I’m tired. But isn’t that true for everybody? Don’t worry, be happy? Or as my dear sweet acupuncturist Dr. Wong says: ‘No thinking too much.’ ” She offered a serene smile. “No thinking too much. Very good phrase.”

O'Malley's March (Dirty Linen, 2001)

2006-08-18T15:59:00.000-07:00

Well, Mayor O'Malley did leave his band, eventually. Can't say what ever happened to him after that.

From Dirty Linen #93 (Apr/May '01)

O’Malley’s March

Featuring His Honor,
the Mayor of Baltimore

by Pamela Murray Winters

The club is hazy, especially around the stage, where green-lit smoke billows down on the band. The front man has his muscle-T on. He’s got the shortest hair on the stage, and a choirboy face, but he can pogo and duckwalk like some unholy combo of Chuck Berry and Joey Ramone. He even strums his six-string behind his head. It’s a hell of a spectacle, and the music’s not bad, either. He’s got his dream gig, opening for Shane McGowan and the Popes, but some of this happy, staggering throng is here to see him, not some ex-Pogue.

After the first number, panting slightly, he tells the crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, my mother and father raised me with three ambitions. Number 1, to serve my country. Number 2, to be a faithful and loving husband and father. Number 3, to open for Shane McGowan.” He’s three for three tonight.

Ladies and gentlemen, the youngest-ever mayor of Maryland’s largest city, a family man, and a kick-ass musician: Martin O’Malley.

A native of Rockville, Maryland, Martin O’Malley has been playing Irish and Irish-based music for 20 of his 36 years. He started performing in junior year of high school, at Washington, D.C., venues like Ireland’s Own, the Four Provinces, and the legendary, now-defunct Matt Kane’s. “When I got into music,” he said, “there must have been seven full-time Irish bars and only about four full-time Irish bands” in the Washington area, so his band, Shannon Tide, got a lot of work.

Somehow, O’Malley managed to combine music with legal studies and politics. He worked on Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign, graduated from Catholic University and the University of Maryland School of Law, and became Baltimore’s Assistant States Attorney in 1988. That same year, he formed a trio, playing “Planxty-type music” with uilleann piper Paul Levin, known then and now as “the Piper of Pikesville.” (Pikesville is a largely Jewish Baltimore neighborhood; O’Malley noted that folks outside the band’s hometown miss the joke.) Levin had become interested in Irish culture in college and traces his own musical career to a trip to Ireland after grad school: “I picked up Planxty’s black album [Planxty (Shanachie, 1973)] on that trip and have been trying to play the music since. It’s a good thing I didn’t know how hard the pipes were going to be to learn, otherwise... Anyway, as Liam O’Flynn’s playing was so effortlessly compelling, I had to try.”

The band’s sound broadened and deepened over the ensuing decade with the addition of new members. “Jamie Wilson, our drummer, keeps it going,” said Levin, “and our electric guitar player, Ralph Reinoldi, adds a lot. He learned my repertoire practically overnight; now he and I trade tunes all the time.” The current lineup is rounded out by bass player Bob Baum and harper/trombonist Jared Denhard.

“The drums, electric guitar, and horn section have let us put more kick and drive in what we do,” Levin noted. Further, O’Malley has become more active in bringing new songs to the band: “Martin has more and more written his own material from out of the Irish-American experience and his response to Irish history.”

O’Malley emphasized that his perspective is Irish-American, not Irish. “My great-grandfather came from Ireland,” O’Malley said. His most recent composition, “Farewell Clonbur,” commemorates the Irish town from which his great-grandfather emigrated. He’s been to Ireland four times, most recently last September with a group of local politicians on Aer Lingus’ inaugural direct flight from Baltimore to Dublin.

The city that O’Malley now helms has strong Irish roots, O’Malley observed. “It’s not as Irish as it once was, when it had Irish enclaves. But in the 1840s, Baltimore was second only to New York in Irish immigration.” In 1827, the nation’s first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, started from the city’s Mount Clare Station. Many Irish immigrants who intended to go West came through Baltimore, and a good number of them stayed.

But Baltimoreans of all origins are loyal to their hometown band, and O’Malley’s election in 1999 has led to more eclectic bookings. “His high profile, and the way he has been so warmly received by the people in the area,” Levin said, “has increased both the size of the audiences that show up at any gig, as well as the types of gigs we have been offered. In this past year, we played two remarkable, sold-out shows with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, opened for the Chieftains and Los Lobos at Pier 6, opened Artscape in front of Patti LaBelle, and played to a great crowd at the 9:30 Club in front of Shane MacGowan.” (At 9:30, when Levin introduced a Turlough O’Carolan tune, someone in the crowd shouted a request. O’Malley replied: “I’m not gonna do ‘Dirty Old Town’—are you frickin’ kidding? Blasphemy!”)

But the City Hall gig has its downside, O’Malley noted. “Being mayor has cut down on opportunities to practice and play.” It’s difficult for him to play bars these days: “If a bar [that O’Malley’s March plays] should do some questionable advertising, the neighborhood association will call to complain that I’ve played that bar.

“One of the things you give up when you’re elected to a high-up office is your alone time. That’s when you typically write stuff. I’ve struggled with this. I wrote ‘Farewell Clonbur’ only because I had a day by myself — I wrote the song outside Queensbridge Housing Project in New York, working the polls [campaigning] for my little brother.”

O’Malley’s March closes the 9:30 set with the closer of the band’s second album, Wait for Me: “Song for Justice.” In his classically Irish tenor, O’Malley croons: “If the nations of the world can rise, so genocide will cease / Can’t we hope that in our lifetimes that Ireland will know peace?” O’Malley is proud of “Song for Justice,” calling it “the most significant thing I’ve done in politics” – besides seeing Baltimore’s notorious murder rate drop 13% over the first year of his administration.

If O’Malley is forced to choose between music and politics, he’ll be leaving the band that bears his name. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be able to keep playing, because of the demands of his office. “But that’s part of the suspense,” he grins.

Stephen Fearing (Dirty Linen, late 1997)

2006-08-18T15:48:00.000-07:00

From Dirty Linen #73 (Dec '97/Jan '98).

On more than one occasion, I've heard Stephen tell a story onstage that relates to the very night of our interview. He was opening for John Wesley Harding, who was then given an opening slot for Cracker at the 9:30 Club. Or--whatever; I don't know all the technicalities of who's "opening" versus "co-billed" and all of that. What I do know is that Stephen ended up playing first on a bill of four artists, with what seemed like 17 people in the audience. It was an instance that really brought home to me how thankless a job a touring musician can feel like he has sometimes.

Anyway, we cut out early, went over to the Brickskeller for the interview, and we missed some kind of rock-star moment with Cracker, during which someone smacked someone else in the face with a bass, or something. I haven't seen Stephen in years; you ask him about it when you see him (because you should see him).

The bit at the end was a sidebar--it's all in Stephen's words.

Stephen Fearing
Messages From Home
by Pamela Murray Winters

“Home, turn the headlights off, close my eyes
And let go of the wheel...”

— Stephen Fearing, “Home,” 1997

Stephen Fearing has to be the most patient interview subject ever — putting up with inane questions, apologizing for “talking your ear off,” allowing a writer to drive him through darkest Washington in search of a parking space without pointing out that maybe it would help if the headlights were on.

He’s a man at peace with his life, a man who has been on welfare and watched a 10-year relationship crack in two, a man with many fathers, a man who has struggled to find home. Industrial Lullaby, his fourth solo album, reveals that man, easing into his 30s with a wealth of worldly experience, reaching out and finding something better than the innocence he’s lost.

Connect the dots on a map of the places Fearing has lived, and you’re left looking at a strange constellation: a bent arrow. He was born, to an Irish mother and English father, just outside Vancouver in a place called Horseshoe Bay. Six years later, when his family traveled to Ireland for his uncle’s wedding, his mother fell in love with the best man. A year later, his stepfather-to-be came to Vancouver and took Fearing’s mother and her children back to Dublin.

Fearing spent the next 11 years in Ireland, where his interest in music began. (Some of his schoolmates at Mount Temple Comprehensive were similarly inclined; they later became The Stars of Heaven and U2.) At 18 he met a fellow outsider, an American exchange student, and traveled back to Minneapolis with him. After two years in the United States, he returned to British Columbia, where his sisters lived, then to Alberta, and then back to Vancouver. Now he’s in Guelph, Ontario, midway between the extremes.

It’s no surprise, then, that so many of his songs were written on the road. His pursuit of classical and acoustic guitar skill and his rich baritone come more naturally to him than songwriting, and he recalled an early attempt: “I remember when I left Minneapolis, my friends and I took this trip — we hopped freight trains from Minneapolis to Seattle, except we ended up in Portland by mistake. I came back to Minneapolis and did some more playing, and then I caught a bus out west. I remember sitting on the bus and just going through hell trying to write this song and wondering if it was good or bad. And that was the start... I don’t know how many years later, I’m still wondering if it’s good or bad.”

It’s also not surprising how much of his history makes its way into his songs. “The Longest Road,” from The Assassin’s Apprentice, details the conflicted feelings of a young nomad: “Canada/The first country of my youth/My heart was ever drawn to you like a tongue to a broken tooth.”

I first met Fearing as The Assassin’s Apprentice, a set of tales of people on the move, had just crossed the border into the United States. It was no longer a new album (Fearing had already begun the Blackie and the Rodeo Kings project) and he was able to reflect on it.

It is, musically for the listener and personally for Fearing, an album of turning points. “None of the songs on it were consciously about breaking up a 10-year relationship, but I listened to it four months later and realized that it’s all over the record.”

Poet Angela Hryniuk was his companion for a decade. In 1988, the couple was living on welfare in a downtrodden section of Vancouver. They met an accountant named Gary Nixon, who, Fearing remembered wryly, “took great pleasure in the fact that my girlfriend’s typewriter cost more than our car.” Impressed with Fearing’s talent as a singer and guitarist, Nixon put up the money for the album Out to Sea.

That album won Fearing a reputation: “For a while I was the young up-and-coming political songwriter.” You can hear authentic pain in the mournful melody and acute lyrics of “Welfare Wednesday,” based on Fearing’s firsthand observation of his neighborhood. “It was very real for me. The thing that struck me at the time was the fact that I was living in a neighborhood of people most [of whom] were on welfare. I knew that wasn’t my lot. I was lucky enough to be raised white, middle-class, male, and I was just doing some time there and was going to move on. But there were people there, they’d been living that life for a long time, and they’d probably live it the rest of their life.”

Indeed, Fearing moved on and up. Blue Line was produced by Clive Gregson and featured such luminaries as BJ Cole on pedal steel and Christine Collister on backing vocals. Many, including Fearing, consider it the weakest of his albums, but it builds on his social-critic reputation with songs like “Turn Out the Lights,” an adult’s recollection of childhood abuse. It came out just before its label, New Roots, went bankrupt. “In 1990,” said Fearing, “I found myself with no record label, no manager, and no voice because I got singer’s nodes.”

Another three years passed. “I put records out about every three years,” Fearing noted. Along came a new manager, Bernie Finkelstein, and a new record. The Assassin’s Apprentice was the one that looked like a starmaker, with guest spots by Sarah McLachlan and Richard Thompson, production by Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, and the strongest set of Fearing’s compositions and vocals to date.

The album produced no hits, no major publicity, no burst of radio airplay on either side of the Canadian border. His relationship with Hryniuk ended, and he left Vancouver once more. A less stubborn man would have quit by now, gone back to bus driving in the Rockies or back on welfare. Fearing was saved by his own persistence, maybe a little luck, and the influence of a new crowd.

“There’s a songwriter in Canada... I started off by being a very long-distance fan of his; when I was living in Ireland, my sister gave me a copy of one of his records. His name’s Willie P. Bennett, and I’d be very surprised if you’d heard of him.

“When I moved back to Canada, I met him and was star struck, and we became friends slowly, and now he’s one of my real close friends.

“So when I moved out east to where I live now, outside Toronto, I felt the need to get in touch with some of the musicians I knew there. I phoned up a fellow called Colin Linden, who’s a blues prodigy — there’s a picture of him at the age of 13 with Howlin’ Wolf. I said we should get together, and we did and had a great time, and I realized that he’s a very busy guy and it wouldn’t be possible to get together with him that frequently — unless I could come up with a really good idea.

“Something I’d been thinking about for a couple of years was to do an album of Willie’s stuff. I e-mailed Colin and he basically freaked out because he’d been talking about exactly the same thing with his wife that day, when he got my e-mail. That was in November, and we were in the studio by January [1996] with a third vocalist named Tom Wilson. And basically we did it as a band. We put a band together with three vocalists, three very different styles. Tom plays in a band called Junkhouse, very heavy-duty hardcore rocking music from an industrial town, Hamilton. Colin’s a blues player, and I’m the sensitive singer-songwriter guy. So it was three different takes, and it took three of us to cover the material.

“The studio process was the antithesis of everything I’ve done in the studio; we had five days to record 15 songs. We were literally counting in songs, the tape rolling, I wasn’t sure where the chord changes were, and Colin’s going ‘One! Two! Three!’ and I’m freaking out and following him as we’re recording. And there’s a spontaneity to the record that I’ve never gotten onto a record before. There’s a vibe and an energy. And there’s a lot of mistakes. But there’s something very lovely about it, and it was really good for me. Colin really made me look at the idea of flying by the seat of your pants. So I’m hoping that next time I make a record it’ll have that sort of spontaneity about it.”

Blackie and the Rodeo Kings spurred a tour that was a lot of fun for all concerned. “With Blackie,” said Colin Linden, “that was just Stephen and I and Tom Wilson getting to know each other. We had no idea, when we did the Blackie album, that we would really turn into a band. And further to that, we had no idea we’d become such close friends. And I really feel like I love those guys — they’re two of my closest friends in the world. All that happened, really, since we made the record. Making the record was great, but when we actually went on the road with it we just had so much fun.”

When Linden became the producer of Fearing’s fourth solo album, Industrial Lullaby, he used the Blackie experience to help move Fearing into a new place, where instinct grabbed the reins from perfectionism. Linden said, “Stephen — he’s quite critical of himself, which is in some ways why he’s as good as he is, but I think this time he had a lot of support from his pals.”

On Industrial Lullaby, Fearing’s memories sprout new wings: The personal becomes universal in a new and powerful way. He worked as hard as usual, particularly on songwriting. “I deliberately tried, when I was writing my lyrics, to write a little bit less densely. So I was constantly throwing words out of sentences, getting rid of extraneous ‘ands’ and ‘the’s’ and what you end up with is maybe a little more poetic, but there’s certainly a little bit more room in it. That’s what I was trying to get, more space in the lyrics. They’re not so dense, and yet they don’t lose their bite or their depth. So I was trying to be simple and yet not be simplistic.”

But he also let spontaneity enter: “I don’t feel like I’m processing everything right down to crossing all my t’s and dotting all my i’s before I’ll write about it, in that I’m not necessarily trying to tie everything up as neatly. So I’m writing things that are a little bit more oblique and not necessarily trying to sort them all out.” The songs, by Fearing alone or with Wilson or Bennett, are still new to him: “‘Dog on a Chain’ is the last one I wrote — I basically wrote it on a Friday-Saturday and then went into the studio the following Thursday.”

Producer Linden is pleased with the result: “It kind of felt like the previous records might have been a little bit in color. This one, I kind of think of it as more black and white — less high-end glitzy sound, less of a crystal chamber, more of a cedar box. Woody tones, a bit of a grainier sound to it overall. And I thought that a lot of that was accomplished by what we chose to record with and where we chose to record, but a lot of it was recording it in a room where a lot of us played together.”

The affection of Fearing’s friends is easy to see. Fellow Canadian musician James Keelaghan enthused, “He’s one of my best buddies, and I think he’s a spectacular talent, and a largely underrated talent. I also think he’s a musician’s musician, an incredible guitar player and a great lyricist.”

Fearing’s married now; the song “Coryanna” on Industrial Lullaby, a gorgeous, unabashed toe-curler, is dedicated to his wife. He’s reached a state of serenity but not, never, complacency. “On the one hand, after three years my home life is very settled. It’s a real strong anchor for me. And I think after you get very introverted — introverted in the sense of ‘OK, this is my new home, this is my new situation’ — at some point, when you feel like your house is in order, literally, you start looking out again and it’s the same old world out there.”

“I think people who have liked Stephen in the past can hear him having a good time on this record,” said Linden. “They can hear him evolving. So it’s not like, ‘Oh, now he’s doing what he should be doing’ or anything like that. It’s like, ‘Wow, this is cool, where he’s going’.”

So why isn’t Fearing as well known as many of his nominal peers? Could it be that some find his lyrics too dark? “I don’t find it easy to write funny or happy songs, per se, although for sure I try and find some happiness in my life, and it’s important to me to try to get it down,” said Fearing. “I guess I find it very difficult to write about that only. Even if I’m writing a love song, to my wife — “Coryanna” — the only reason that it’s positive and happy is because we had to go through the mill. And so I feel that it’s my job to write down both ends of it; otherwise, it doesn’t seem real to me. So a lot of my songs might have an overall dark subtext, but it’s part of the whole picture for me. And actually, a lot of times when people look at my material and think it’s very dark, I feel like they haven’t read it all the way through.”

Some of the best of Fearing’s songs feature lyrics about the loss of innocence. The theme was made crystal clear in “Turn Out the Lights”:

I have kept it secret
And denied my youth away
And my family is too frightened now
To look into my eyes
There’s a child behind the adult
They would surely recognize

In the wooden box of Industrial Lullaby, the pain is rougher still. “Man O’ War” couples a driving rock accompaniment to the images in the eyes of a young soldier:

The cheap, broken china of civilians
The anguish of a father breaking down...
And the eyes just dry out if you don’t close them
And the heart becomes immune to the sounds
I lost my religion to a rifle
I’ll talk to any deity now

The title track juxtaposes beautiful visions with ugly realities; the dense interplay of the Blackie band’s guitars echoes the hazy, deadly loveliness of the skyscape. The studios used for the recording added to the track’s resonance. “The whole record was done in places that were more environments than polished recording studios,” said Linden about Chemical Sound and the Gas Station. “We’d have to occasionally stop in the middle or something waiting for the drummer downstairs to stop practicing or for the truck that was delivering beer to the bar down the street to stop honking his horn.”

Fearing is eager to get the album heard and to get out before audiences once more. He thrives on the energy of live performance — it’s how he honed his craft in the early days. In his school days, “I was a guitar nerd. I played some sports, and I played my guitar and hung out with my buddies, and we’d have long nights drinking — we’d buy a six-pack illegally and go home to somebody’s house and play a Neil Young song 20 zillion times. And so it was the performing that I loved, and I still love.”

With Industrial Lullaby, Fearing the nomad becomes Fearing the traveler, with a home at his center. “Guelph is where my family is. It’s where a lot of my friends are. It’s a little community; you can wrap your brain around it pretty easily and know what’s going on there. I have a lot of very good friends there, very supportive.” But home seems to be within Fearing himself, and his messages from that place give us wings.

Writing Tips from Stephen Fearing

I lived with a writer for 10 years, a woman named Angela Hryniuk, who’s a wonderful poet. She sat me down one day after a concert and she said, “Y’know, the hard thing about your songs is that if you don’t have the record and you haven’t had a chance to listen to them over and over, there’s no repetition, so it’s like one image is stuck in your head and you’re just getting it and then there’s another five that come at you.” I took that to heart, and I’m trying to find a way to still have songs that are thick, that are dense, but at the same time there’s some space in them; they’re not clubbing you over the head with images and metaphors.

When I get a song I’d do anything — I’d wash the dishes, I’d clean the car rug first — as my manager told me one day, he said, “Stephen, I could put you in a room with nothing in it and you’d have to refinish the floors before you wrote a fucking song.” And he’s right. But once you’ve got a song, it’s like pulling threads that turn into a string that turns into a rope and then you know you’ve got it. I’ll sit up ’til the sun comes up and feel refreshed like nothing else. It’s weird. And there’s an immediate feeling of, almost, depression, because you know you’ve got to do it again.

Go back out and start pulling on threads, and they all break... it’s a very weird thing to do, I think, writing songs. I write in a journal every day. I play games with myself like sharpening two pencils and I’m not allowed to stop writing ’til they’re both blunt, or I have to write four pages a day, no matter what. I did that for the last 12 months, since I moved and settled into my new place. And at the end of it, I had piles of journals that were full of a lot of garbage. I’d finish a journal that’d take a couple of months to fill, four pages a day, and then I’d sit down and write a song in a day. And on the one hand it’s possible that you get more in shape, but a lot of the time I was writing about how much I hated writing! I sorta read it and go, “This is absolute crap, this is whining.” And I know that when I get hit by a song idea, if I follow it through...I have learned that if it’s late at night and I get a song idea, I gotta get up and write it down. That’s something I’ve learned because I’ve written a gazillion half-songs in my head that never make it to the page. But the actual writing for the sake of writing...I’m not sure if it really works for me. It’s a debate that I’m still having with myself.

Sometimes it’s fun to play games where you take somebody else’s melody and strip the lyrics away and try and write your own lyrics, and then strip the melody away and write your own melody to the lyrics you wrote, and you end up with your own song, but it’s directly related. [Stephen, have you done this on your latest album?] Um... yep, and I’m not going to tell you which ones, and I’m not going to tell you who I listened to. But yeah. I was playing games with myself all over the place to sorta edge this thing out and get this thing going. There’s any number of little outwitting-yourself games. It’s really quite fun to do.

Oliver Schroer by Numbers

2006-08-18T15:39:00.000-07:00

This article is from Dirty Linen #90 (Oct/Nov 2000). I don't know how the somewhat unusual format will translate to this rather ordinary layout, but you'll get the idea.

When last seen, Schroer was playing in James Keelaghan's touring band.

Oliver Schroer by Numbers

by Pamela Murray Winters

5 feet, 17 and a half inches

That’s the self-described height of the person onstage. The audience can’t help but take note of this, and of the mohawk that crowns his head (for those who can see that far up).

The man describes what he is about to play, a tribute to one of his favorite composers. After a rather lengthy discourse, he lifts his instrument, delicately, and plays with great passion and intensity. And the audience doesn’t hear a single note.

3 minutes, 59 seconds

That’s the length of the piece this mysterious figure has just played on his invisible/imaginary fiddle. It’s called “John Cage’s Reel,” and it’s on his latest CD, O2. Not once, but twice. (The longer version at the end of the second disc is described as “John Cage’s Reel [extended version].”)

Welcome to the world of Oliver Schroer, dubbed by a friend “Canada’s tallest freestanding fiddle player.” If you think you’ve wandered into a Monty Python sketch or a Peter Schickele experiment — P.D.Q. Bach’s cousin Oliver? — think again. Schroer is utterly serious about music. It’s with him every second of the day. He composes, sets his compositions aside, and finds that they seem to write themselves when he separates himself from them. In the liner notes to O2, he writes: “I didn’t really write these pieces at all. Rather, they announced themselves to me, and I was quick enough and lucky enough to catch them as they flickered by.”

Head in the clouds? Sure. Feet on the ground? Absolutely. Schroer’s music is rooted in a wide range of influences. Here’s his list: J.S. Bach, the Beatles, Johnny Winter, Yes, Steeleye Span, Lenny Breau, jazz yodeler Leon Thomas, Ricky Scaggs, and early Emmylou Harris, Quebec fiddler Jean Carignan, Frankie Gavin with De Danaan, Kevin Burke, Canadian fiddler Denis Lanctot, Norwegian fiddler Sven Nyhus, “various hot Balkan bands, Ituri rain forest pygmy music, Tuvan throat-singing,” Dewey Balfa, and Calvin Carriere.

Like many other children, Schroer was first exposed to music when he was given violin lessons. Again like most kids, he found practicing a bore. On his website, he tells this story: “I got a cassette player at a certain point, and I made a tape of my scales, exercises, and arpeggios. When my mom told me to go upstairs and practise, I would go into my room, and play the tape. I never told my mom till last year!”

That’s the age at which Schroer began to lose interest in playing violin. Classical instruction was “too rigid, not enough fun.” He learned “Orange Blossom Special” on a dare, as a party piece. But his father gave him a guitar for his 16th birthday, and for a time his tastes turned more to Pink Floyd and Gentle Giant. “Structurally,” he said, “that music rubbed off on me. The Beatles, too. I was a real Beatles fan.”

He was a musician at heart, but on paper he was a graduate student in philosophy when he went back to the fiddle. “I met an old friend from high school who had this band. In the context of his country swing band, I picked up the fiddle again and got into just playing lines on the fiddle. Then at one of those dances we played, we needed to actually do the music for a square dance, so he passed along a tape of Don Messer to me. I learnt a couple of those tunes, and that’s how I got into it. And then I kinda got hooked on fiddle tunes and began learning fiddle tunes. Even though things have got pretty esoteric and stuff, I really did start with Don Messer, like a good Canadian boy!”

100 bucks (Canadian)

That’s what it cost to be an official busker on Toronto’s subway system. “They had this system where you audition, and then you get a license to busk,” Schroer explained. “Only eight people got the license. So it was actually pretty stiff competition.”

Schroer went on: “I would play for about 5 hours a day. For me, it was a real journeyman thing,” At this point, in the 1980s, “I played alone, I didn’t jam with anybody, I didn’t play with anybody, I just played all the time in the subway and learned tunes like crazy. Somebody passed along a tape of De Danaan, and I heard Frankie Gavin for the first time—that blew my mind. Somebody passed me on a tape of Jean Carignan, the French-Canadian fiddler, and that blew my mind. And then I heard Scott Skinner, and that was amazing. So various friends took it upon themselves to give me a bit of an education by passing along stuff.” He also put his music-reading skills to use by learning tunes from books. When he first got the busker’s license, Schroer knew about 35 tunes.

600

That’s the number of tunes Schroer knew four years later, when he ended his busking apprenticeship and embarked on a new educational path. Philosophy had fallen by the wayside much earlier. “I’ve also got the kind of mind that I’ll forget a lot of things,” Schroer admitted freely. “I mean, I studied philosophy—how much of that do you think I remember? Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. Very little. But tunes...I just have this mind that will not forget a tune.”

Through fiddle playing, “I eventually locked into this circle of fiddle players who would get together to do old-time fiddle music. Basically old timers, basically old guys.” One of them was a character named Norm Gibson.

“Norm had made it his personal mission to collect fiddle tunes, collect all the fiddle tunes he could. But he only liked Ontario-style tunes! Fiddle music, in the realm of possible music, is a pretty narrow piece of the pie, really. Even within the pie of fiddle music, the part that he wanted was a narrow slice of that pie. I played him some incredible Irish music once, and some Scottish stuff, and he said [puts on crotchety old-guy voice], ‘Don’t play me that Scottish shit!’ He was really quite the character.”

For another decade, Schroer became Gibson’s transcriber. “He would go around to fiddle parties or contests or wherever there was a tune being played and tape them on his little Walkman thing, and he would make me a tape, and they would often be really bad tapes, and I would end up transcribing the tunes. So I got really good at writing out tunes. I could do that for myself. If I went to fiddle contests and sat around at parties afterwards and listened to people play, then I could pick up great tunes that way also.”

It was back to tapes and recorders for Schroer, only this time, the struggle wasn’t to convince someone that he was working on his music—it was to save the music itself, sometimes from the clutches of its collector.

“He was funny,” Schroer said of Gibson, his late friend. “He was such a lousy ethnomusicologist! Because if a tune had three parts — he didn’t believe that fiddle tunes should have three parts. He thought they should have two parts. So then he would make me chop off a part. Or if it went up to third position — it went up high on the fingerboard — ‘Make it low! You know what I like!’ So he’d make me change tunes! I tried to stay true to the original, harmonically and stuff.”

“I got them filed alphabetically!” Schroer mimicked Gibson’s voice, describing the file cabinet where he kept the transcriptions, divided primly into waltzes, jigs, and reels — about 5,000 of them.

“In the context of Norm, I did so much writing, and I remember when I started out it was quite laborious, and I really had to listen hard. But it really was an education for me. I’ve developed this new system of notation where I can write down music as fast as I can hear it. I can write down jigs and reels at playing speed. I haven’t quite perfected it yet, but I’m getting there. Because I can hear it—it’s just a matter of physically getting it down on the page. Looking back on it, I realize that those years and years of doing that thing for Norm really paid off for me.”

As he was transcribing tunes for Gibson, he was finding music of his own. “I guess I began writing tunes in about 1988 or so — actually, earlier, about 1986 — but only a little bit. And then over the years it snowballed, it became more and more.” By 1993, he found himself with “this huge pile of tunes” and decided to make a CD. But he had a problem: too much music for a single disc.

Furthermore, while a lot of his music was directly influenced by the traditionalism enforced by Gibson and heightened by listening to Celtic recordings, he also had a fair amount that was “the wild, wild stuff, the crazy, Balkan-sounding stuff, and the musical soundscapes.”

So he divided the pile in two. He started with the more-accessible project. Once again, he found himself listening to a lot of tapes. “A lot of things developed because I got this little four-track cassette recorder, and I began layering up things. I’d play riffs, or I’d jam around and then I’d come up with a riff, and then I’d come up with another riff on top of that. So it became finding the vertical structure of music — not only strong melodies, because at that point I’d been playing so many jigs and reels and exploring what I thought were the best ones and modeling those tunes, in the sense of saying ‘I want to write a tune that sounds like’— whatever, like ‘Mason’s Apron’ or something, that has the punch of that tune, and trying to come up with something that was new, but sounded like it had always been around. That’s a really interesting exercise — to do tunes that sound sort of linked to a tradition, but really brand new.

“With Jigzup I was very conscious of doing a fiddle album for non-fiddle players. Fiddle players can listen to an infinity of tunes. It doesn’t matter. It’s like ‘Another tune!…Oh, that’s great! Another tune!’ ” But Schroer wanted an album of songs for a non-fiddler’s attention span. He wanted brand-new tunes that sounded ageless. He hit his mark. Jigzup came out at the end of 1993 and was rapidly nominated for a Juno. Suddenly Schroer found himself scheduled to appear onstage at a huge Toronto venue for a Juno showcase. It was a far cry from transcribing tapes or collecting change in his fiddle case.

“Before I made Jigzup,” Schroer recalled, “I had actually begun playing with a lot of different people. Those were the years where I was playing in piles of bands. I remember checking my date book one year and realizing that over the year I’d played with 37 different bands. I was a musical slut!”

He drew on these connections when it came time to assemble a band to promote Jigzup for the Juno showcase. “I’d filled in with the bagpipe funk band Rare Air for a while, so I knew the drummer for that band [Rich Greenspoon]. I had this band called Eye Music…I got the bass player from that band [David Woodhead], and then there was a young percussionist in town who played bodhrán and stuff who was really good, and I got that guy [Ben Grossman]. My friend David Travers-Smith is a trumpet player. I was living with him, so I roped him in, right? So that’s how Stewed Tomatoes came to be.”

The Stewed Tomatoes sound, described as “an aromatic mix of tunes that would make the Mustaphas envious,” is less akin to Jigzup than to Schroer’s 1994 album Whirled, which was drawn from the second pile of tunes he’d accumulated. The first Stewed Tomatoes album, appropriately titled Oliver Schroer and the Stewed Tomatoes, was released in 1996. Its elements span the planet, as evidenced by the descriptions of the compositions that are given on Schroer’s website: “The Yodeller from Guadalajara—snappy, happy latin alpine feel”; “My Uncle’s Pockets—Klezmer meets Don Messer”; “Way Down—swampy, funky acoustic hip-hop.”

With this kind of eclecticism, does Schroer worry about being pegged as a dilettante? He gave a typically thoughtful answer. “If you suddenly discover something, and you know you feel a strong relationship to it, strong enough to elicit years of hard work, then you will probably get somewhere with it. Look at Tracy Schwarz, for example. He played old-timey stuff with the New Lost City Ramblers, and then, one day, he discovered Cajun music, and dug really deeply into that to become a well-respected master in that tradition. The danger lies in dabbling — a little of this, a little of that.

“My audience doesn’t have to know all of my influences and background to understand my music. I compare it to cooking. I use a wide and strange array of ingredients, but when I cook up a tune or a concert of tunes, people respond immediately — does it taste good, or not?”

9 months

The length of time it takes to make a baby is the same length of time Schroer once went without playing. He had tendinitis. “It led me away from super-fast jigs and reels into more subtle territory, where the criterion is not speed, but musicality and heart.

“For me, music is so experiential,” Schroer explained. “When I’m not near my instrument, I always have my virtual fiddle, that internal instrument every musician carries with them. I’m constantly creating tunes in my head by playing them on an imaginary violin. On the other hand, I do spend a fair bit of time trying to actually push myself to do entirely new things.”

One of Schroer’s relatively “new things” is production. He produced James Keelaghan’s 1999 CD Road, which represented a departure for Keelaghan’s recordings. “I think the sound is wider,” Keelaghan told the Canadian newspaper, Globe and Mail. “Oliver suggested some things that I’d never considered, like saxophone and clarinet, and they worked beautifully.” Keelaghan described his producer and friend as “endlessly creative, very concentrated, able to handle a vast work load, and totally entertaining.”

While Schroer was working on Road, he was also working on his fifth album. (His fourth, Celtica, came out in 1998.) Using what he’d learned while composing Jigzup, he went back to the tape recorder to find the shapes of the tunes. “I recorded the whole thing from top to bottom. I turned on the tape machine and played one tune, then I stopped, had a little breath and said ‘thank you’ and played the next tune, and went through the whole darn album without even stopping tape.

“The reason I did that was so that having played one tune and having chosen carefully what tune would go after that, each tune infuses the subsequent tune with a certain amount of its energy. It’s like you tell a story: You tell the next part of the story, and then you tell the next part of the story. The listener does change as they go along with you.”

The next two nights, he repeated the process. “I had three complete versions of the album. So I picked out the best stuff, the best versions of the tunes, put them on a CD and listened to them for about a week. And in listening to them I realized where things weren’t happening, where I was skipping over an area or making too much of something or maybe making not enough of something. And then I went back and I did the whole thing again.”

When Schroer talks about “skipping over an area,” he doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s deviated from a written score. He first began working on O2 — or, more accurately, first realized he was working on O2 — when, as he played, “different things began popping out. Different kinds of melodies. They weren’t jigs and reels, they weren’t Balkan-sounding things, they weren’t really Stewed Tomatoes-sounding things, but they were a whole different kind of thing. And that’s what became the O2 stuff. It was a different kind of melody. It was based on subtle rhythmic distinctions and subtle harmonic things and it basically seemed to work in a solo sense. It was almost like they’re these little folk partitas, like the Bach solo partitas in the solo classical violin repertoire. They were a little bit related to that, a little bit related to some bluesy things, almost like Creole Cajuny bluesy things in a way — because I did play a lot of blues when I was a guitar player, when I was like, 17 and 18 — all these little influences filtered through there again, but it was like a different kind of melody.”

Schroer went on. “Also, these melodies weren’t like jigs and reels, where there’s one succession of notes. It’s like this note follows that note, this note follows that note, and that’s the way the tune goes. This was more like: In this general territory, I want to get from A to B, and I generally do it this way, but it’s a little bit different every time. I spend so much time playing a certain musical territory that when I play, instead of following a melody to get from point A to point B — ’cause that’s all melodies are, it’s a way to get from point A to point B — I can basically strike out cross country, and go off-road. And I don’t have to follow that particular melody. I can just play around because I know the geography, I know the territory really well.”

Schroer has come up with new names for the 23 tunes that comprise O2: shapes, whimsies, fractal reels. Yes, the adjective “hippie-dippie” has come up in at least one review of the album. But there are two ways to understand that Schroer is for real. The first, and best, is to listen to his music. The second is to listen to him talk about it. Even “John Cage’s Reel,” the concept of which sounds at first like bargain-basement Dadaism, has a purpose for the listener. Schroer ended each of the two discs of O2 with a version of “John Cage’s Reel” because he wanted us to clear our palates for what would come next — to have “a kind of mental breathing time, just to reload your brain.” He observed that on multiple CD players, when a CD ended “ there’d be something totally different on there afterwards, just when you’d set a certain mood up, then it’d go straight into something really raucous and crazy and disturb your whole brain state there, right?”

Right. When you relax into O2 or treat yourself to a Schroer solo performance, trust him. He compares himself to monologist Spalding Gray — his stories are as much a part of his shows as the music. Gray once said, “You know, I say that I can’t make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I’m cutting and pasting memories of my life.” Oliver Schroer creates aural collages, built of sound and silence, that are drawn on his decades of being Oliver Schroer. That’s his truth and his tradition.

Richard Thompson, Action Packed (and my 100th post)

2006-08-17T10:26:00.000-07:00

I had to find a Thompson review for my 100th post.

In case you just came in: I'm putting various published pieces, old and new, on my blog. The order is more or less random. Sooner or later, I'll have tracked down all the old stuff worth repeating, I guess.

I will try to fix all of the fonts sometime. And I'm sure there's a more efficient way to present clips, anyway, but I'm of a family whose motto is "That'll Do Temporarily." (It's supposed to say that on the Winters coat of arms, but no one ever got around to adding it.)

Anyway...

This is from the Washington City Paper, May 11, 2001.

Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years
Richard Thompson
Capitol

"Of the three things I do—writing, recording, performing—probably recording is my least favorite," says a characteristically self-deprecating Richard Thompson in the press kit to his new album, Action Packed. And dammit, Richard, it shows. Comprising 16 tracks from his six albums with Capitol—released between 1988 and last year, when Thompson left the label of his own volition—as well as a new recording and two outtakes, Action Packed is a decidedly uneven collection. Although it may present Thompson's favorites among his recent compositions, it also offers some of the most egregious missteps in his 30-year recording history. Mitchell Froom produced four of Thompson's Capitol releases, and the resulting recordings are cluttered with synths and other injudiciously chosen lush-pop sounds that are at odds with the guitarist's essential rawness. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the gentle lost-love song "I Misunderstood," in which the elegant guitar figure that opens the song is buried under reverby keyboards and Casio-plastic percussion. The few songs that are spared undue Froomage—"1952 Vincent Black Lightning," "Beeswing," and "Waltzing's for Dreamers"—reinforce Thompson's folky cred but reveal only that one dimension of his work. Of the albums excerpted here, only 1999's Mock Tudor, produced by Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf, shows the quietly stubborn artist whose music is rooted in tradition but has rampantly blossomed into something neither folk nor rock. Four Mock Tudor tracks lead up to the fan bait at the end of Action Packed: "Persuasion," originally written for the film Sweet Talker, and the Mock Tudor outtakes "Mr. Rebound" and "Fully Qualified to Be Your Man." The outtakes are as purely Thompson as anything on Mock Tudor: The former is a Celtic/Moroccan-sounding cuckold's plaint, the latter a double-entendre-laden punk-pop romp. But it's "Persuasion" that should make the Capitol suits sorry they let Thompson get away: With spare yet rich acoustic instrumentation and vocal harmonies—Thompson sings most of the backup, with the lead taken by his silken-voiced son Teddy—it's more radio-friendly than anything else in Thompson's iconoclastic back catalog.

Stephen Fearing, That's How I Walk

2006-08-17T10:19:00.000-07:00

From the Washington City Paper, March 29, 2002.

That's How I Walk
Stephen Fearing
True North

Stephen Fearing is the second-best-known artist on Canada's True North Records, home to fellow thinking-person's Canuck Bruce Cockburn for some 30 years. But like curling and the metric system, Fearing enjoys far more success on the kindler, gentler side of the border. There seems to be no reason for his relative obscurity on the Stateside new-folk scene, however: He's got the singer-songwriter hat trick (guitar prowess, pleasant voice, taut compositions), and his work is fairly accessible. Dark? Sometimes, but in a genre in which divorce, depression, and death can be smart career moves, that's a given. Perhaps what's kept prospective listeners at bay--even as it attracts a certain breed of fan--is Fearing's prolixity. In an interview just before the release of his fourth album, Industrial Lullaby, he told me: "I'm trying to find a way to still have songs that are thick, that are dense, but at the same time there's some space in them; they're not clubbing you over the head with images and metaphors." Nearly five years later, Fearing's fifth studio album, That's How I Walk, shows that he's still trying, notably on "Rave On Captain," which tosses Clinton, Dubya, and capitalist crassness into a cocktail shaker: The bright melodic garnish doesn't hide the fact that the drink would have gone down better with fewer ingredients. But less isn't always more here: What we don't get on That's How I Walk are uninterrupted stretches of Fearing's note-perfect fingerstyle guitar-playing, a talent indulged on earlier albums with instrumentals such as "Carsten" on 1988's Out to Sea. What we do get, however, are lush, sophisticated production by Fearing and Colin Linden (Fearing's bandmate in Canadian roots-rock outfit Blackie and the Rodeo Kings) and Fearing's characteristically thoughtful songwriting and alluring baritone. That's How I Walk shines brightest in its most introspective moments: a love song so classically simple you'll think Fearing took a time machine to Tin Pan Alley to retrieve it ("When My Baby Calls My Name"), a gentle view from inside the bell jar ("Me & Mr. Blue," co-written with Ian Thornley), and the lonesomely horny "Glory Train" (by Fearing and Brian denHertog). If it isn't the 39-year-old Fearing's best album--that gold goes to Lullaby--neither is it the work of a coasting midcareer musician; rather, That's How I Walk is an exploratory voyage helmed by a far braver captain than most of the guitar-troubadour expeditions out there. --Pamela Murray Winters

The Kennedys (Washington City Paper, July 2001)

2006-08-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

From the Washington City Paper's too-infrequent "Acts Locally" section, July 27, 2001.

Have Love, Will Travel

In an amphitheater in a Bridgeton, N.J., park, a few days before the solstice, a crowd is fidgeting through the midday swelter as Northern Virginia folk-pop duo the Kennedys finish up their set. Maura pulls a favorite trick, emulating a bass with her Takamine guitar by popping the low-E string. As Pete moves himself and his orange Gretsch downstage until he's out in the elements with the common folk, Mother Nature finally does what she's been threatening all day: turns on the shower heads.

Immediately, the festival-savvy crowd shifts into waterproof mode: Umbrellas swing up, tarps unfurl, and inhibitions lift. And Pete and Maura shift into a Beatles tune. The crowd is soon singing along: "Rai-ai-ai-aiaiaiai-ainnnn/I don't mind."

Later, under the merchandise tent, a dripping but chipper Maura, clad in a multicolored circa-1970 polyester romper, confides that it's rained at nearly all of the last 10 or 12 festivals the Kennedys have played. "But don't let that get around," she laughs. "We'll lose bookings!"

Despite their knack for rainmaking, the Kennedys haven't been hurting for work. Pete, a native Arlingtonian, has been around Washington almost as long as the unrelated political dynasty that shares his name. From their days working in Nanci Griffith's Blue Moon Orchestra through their ascendance on the acoustic circuit, he and wife Maura have built a career out of being musical magpies, adapting to whatever crosses their paths.

Their new album, Positively Live!, is a product of circumstance, "a record that could have come out any time in the course of our career," according to Maura. "We decided to do it now [that] the window of opportunity is there, because we were on Green Linnet for our first two records, and...on Rounder for our second two, but we just parted ways with them—amicably, of course—and so it was the perfect time for us to do the live album."

The album is on the couple's new Jiffyjam label, which Maura hopes will expand their recording possibilities: "Record labels in general—not to dis them at all, but I think it's easier for them to do their thing if it's very clear what kind of music you do. Since we're on our own record label, we don't have to do that now."

Coming on the heels of their 2000 album, Evolver, on which the duo delved into multilayered '60s-style pop, Positively Live! could be seen as, well, retro for the two-person, two-guitar Kennedys. Pete, shaking the raindrops off his mod Chevy Chevelle Super Sport vinyl jacket as we escape the elements in a motor-home dressing room, muses: "I think what we wanted to do [with Positively Live!] was continue evolving—no pun intended—in terms of the music itself and creative energy, but separate that from production. With Evolver, what we wanted to do was take the production as far as we could. But for the next album, we said, 'Let's strip everything away, just the two guitars and our voices, but keep the same level of creativity and the same level of energy.' So it was a challenge in a different way, but definitely not a step backwards toward a more conservative approach."

"People [would] come up to us after a show and say, 'Which record is just like what you just did tonight?'" says Maura. "And we didn't have one, because we were doing the whole studio thing—which we love to do, and we'll never stop doing it. But we thought it was time to do a live album. Also, when we play live, we go into long jams and stuff. People are always asking for that, too: 'Where can I get Pete's long solos?'"

To capture their live show, the Kennedys recorded shows at clubs in Syracuse, N.Y., Lansdowne, Pa., Moundridge, Kan., and Chestertown, Md. The diversity of locales is in keeping with a career that has seen the group tour throughout Europe with Griffith, sojourn in Dublin (the inspiration for much of 1995's River of Fallen Stars), and make a pilgrimage to the Chelsea Embankment site in London where the cover of Richard Thompson's 1983 album Hand of Kindness was photographed.

The duo comes with a ready-made road-trip mythology: They wrote a song together—"kind of Buddy Holly, kind of Everly Brothers," says Maura—at their brief first meeting in Austin, Texas. There, Maura (née Boudreau) was performing in nascent alt-country band the Delta Rays and "studying the Louvin Brothers, that real hard-core country, almost bluegrass," and Pete was playing a solo date between gigs with Griffith. Later, when they decided to see each other again, Pete was in Telluride, Colo., with Griffith's band and Maura was still in Austin, so they settled on a supposedly equidistant meeting point.

Thus, their first date was in Lubbock, Texas—at Holly's grave. (A cursory Internet investigation blows a hole in this anecdote: Lubbock is 499.2 miles from Austin but a whopping 737.6 miles from Telluride. But, hey, the poor kids didn't have Mapquest in 1992.) In 1995, after completing their first album together and taking their marriage vows, they traveled to Woodstock, N.Y., and Las Vegas, visiting two wildly different pop-culture touchstones in one honeymoon.

The duo have a similarly syncretic approach to their music. After hearing their paisley-pop take on the Beatles in Bridgeton, I'm surprised when they cite, as their current musical fascination, gospel—especially the little-known Alabama singer Dorothy Love Coates.

"To me, she's the founder of rock 'n' roll," avows Pete. "Little Richard modeled himself after Dorothy Love Coates....We've been collecting really obscure live '50s gospel performances, because singing reached a peak at that time that was amazing."

Maura emulates the smooth and mellow tone of Sam Cooke singing "You Send Me" and then notes: "But you hear him singing gospel and it's like grit and fire."

"Last year, we were really into Miles Davis and John Coltrane about this time," says Pete. "So it changes."

For people who collect diverse influences, the Washington area is a good place to put down roots, says Pete: "It's a tremendous melting pot. It's like a crossroads in the desert, where different caravans meet up. It's been like that since World War II, when people from all over the country started converging on D.C. to work for the federal government. So there's been a tremendous melding of music, all kinds of music, from gospel and bluegrass to go-go and hardcore.

"I think the national media figures their plate is full in terms of the political scene in D.C. That's enough to cover, so they don't pay any attention at all to the music scene like they would in other places like Austin, which is known as a music town. But D.C. has a tremendous music scene, and types of music, like go-go, that come from D.C." He reels off a list of the area's music legends, from Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye, and Patsy Cline to Danny Gatton, the celebrated ax man whom Pete counted as a mentor and a personal friend until Gatton's 1994 suicide.

"When I moved from Austin to D.C., I wasn't expecting much," admits Maura. "In fact, I knew a lot of D.C. [musicians] who moved down to Austin." She points to Annandale, Va., native Kelly Willis as an example. "So when I came up here I was really surprised at how big and diverse the music scene was. The whole roots scene—the scene that Pete was in—that was really big. There's all kinds of folk, hardcore, bluegrass—I had no idea."

And yet the Kennedys don't spend a lot of nonperforming time in their nominal hometown, Reston. "Our home is really our van," Maura laughs. (In Bridgeton, it's certainly the home for a lot of their apparel: When I last see them, they're strolling toward the lake, Pete in a gold-toned Hawaiian shirt and shorts, Maura in a bias-cut hopsack dress with rainbow stripes.) And New York is as much a home to them as D.C., thanks to the presence of both Maura's family in her native Syracuse and the state's multiplicity of clubs and festivals for the acoustically inclined.

The couple even hit the New York festivals where they're not on the bill. At the venerable Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in Hillsdale, where they've performed three times officially and a couple more as drop-ins, they'll be appearing this weekend—not onstage, but staffing a vintage-clothing booth.

"We're on the New Jersey Turnpike a lot," says Pete. "We could have a home in either place and still be active in both music scenes. [But] we could never extricate ourselves from the D.C. scene, 'cause it's very rich." —Pamela Murray Winters

Natalie Merchant, The House Carpenter's Daughter

2006-08-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

From the Washington City Paper, Nov. 7, 2003 (which happens to be the birthday of a fervid Natalie fan of my acquaintance).

This one has some references that were pretty topical then, but that are now a wee bit dated. "In the Cut"? Did anyone but critics and Meg's kids see that flick?

The House Carpenter's Daughter
Natalie Merchant
Myth America

Pre-In the Cut Meg Ryan notwithstanding, it's tough being an ingénue when you're 40. Natalie Merchant kept the earnest-college-girl-next-door concession going into her 30s, first with 10,000 Maniacs and then as a solo artist, Nation contributor, and poster child for the Utne Reader set. Of course, such schtick has its limits even for the youngsters: When Merchant declared, "I must be one of the wonders of God's own creation" on her 1995 solo album, Tigerlily, more than one listener suspected she believed it a little too much. And if lyrics like those gave the lie to the publicity description of Tigerlily as "humble and understated," so did some of its aesthetic choices. With the triphop rhythms and world-weary imagery of "Carnival," Merchant transformed herself from Joan Baez wannabe to Mighty Aphrodite. The singer's next tour, which opened with her shimmying silhouette projected onto a scrim, ushered in a few years of soul and strut before 2001's Motherland signaled a new stage. The House Carpenter's Daughter, Merchant's debut on her own label after a 16-year relationship with Elektra, signals another, positing the singer as heir not only to Baez, but also to Alan Lomax. She presents a selection of undeniably folky favorites, from Florence Reece's inspiring '30s protest song "Which Side Are You On?" to the delicate old hymn "Weeping Pilgrim." Every choice adds dimension to the Merchant we already know: "Soldier, Soldier," propelled by Graham Maby's ballsy bass, turns a jump-rope rhyme into an after-hours boogie; "Sally Ann," by New York folk-rockers the Horseflies, and "Crazy Man Michael," by their British counterpart, Fairport Convention, do more than pay homage to Merchant's inspirations—they're as deep and loving as a young woman in her grandmother's wedding gown. They rock a little, too, and Merchant takes full advantage of the Horseflies connection by lacing the album with Judy Hyman's fiddle and Richie Stearns' banjo. Sure, those who sneered back in the Maniacs days will probably groan, "O Brother!" and label this just another career move. But for those of us who've prized Merchant's womanly alto—and even, God help us, believed the Sincerity Thing was really sincere—The House Carpenter's Daughter is not only a wise choice, but a winning one. —Pamela Murray Winters

Jennifer Cutting (Washington City Paper, 2000)

2006-08-16T15:58:00.000-07:00

From the Washington City Paper, Aug. 11, 2000.

Composing Herself

The band life made Jennifer Cutting successful. Solo life makes her happy.

By Pamela Murray Winters

Five years ago, Jennifer Cutting had the world at her feet--which put her in the worst possible spot for the earthquake that followed.

She had spent 10 years as the leader of the New St. George, a Takoma Park-based band playing English-style folk-rock. Although the genre has never been particularly fashionable or lucrative, it's had an avid following worldwide for some 30 years. The British bands Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, each fronted by a powerful female singer (Sandy Denny and Maddy Prior, respectively), created the sound, which marries rock arrangements to traditional music or traditional-sounding arrangements to newly composed songs. The New St. George, which featured the rich alto of Lisa Moscatiello in the Denny/Prior slot, was a favorite of Fairport and Steeleye fans and appealed as well to a broader audience, first locally and then internationally.

Cutting played various kinds of accordions and keyboards; she brought a dynamic presence to the stage and also to the band's life behind the scenes as arranger and composer--the "architect" of the band's sound, as she puts it. The New St. George reached its critical and popular zenith in 1994, with the release of High Tea. By 1995, with high-profile gigs on the calendar and a second album in the works, the band seemed poised for greater successes. So it seemed entirely surprising when, in the spring of 1996, the New St. George announced its breakup.

The phrase "artistic differences" barely skirts the depths of the anger, frustration, and exhaustion that led Cutting to call it quits.

"I was writing what I feel was the best material of my career--material that could take the band to the next level: a better record contract, more airplay, more critical respect," Cutting recalls. "But this leap to being a national act is a critical juncture. It takes work to take the sound and presentation up to that level, and that is the crucible that either makes or breaks the band. The members hadn't all signed up to be working at that level of professionalism. Nor had they signed up to play anything but traditional English folk music, with the odd cover thrown in."

In particular, Cutting believed the band wasn't supporting her original material, which she describes as "a bit darker, more left-of-center, and much more adventuresome than what we had been doing."

"It's difficult to maintain creativity while you're struggling with the mundane details of running a touring band--while maintaining a day gig," says Mary Cliff, producer and host of WETA-FM's Traditions. (Cutting's "day gig" is as a reference specialist at the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture.) Cliff has known Cutting since Cutting first arrived in Washington 16 years ago, following her ethnomusicology studies at the University of London. "It didn't surprise me when, after the band quit working, she continued to write," says Cliff.

Cutting, now 40, didn't start writing songs until she was in her 30s. The first song she ever wrote, "All the Tea in India," serves as the centerpiece of High Tea. The atmospheric portrait of an enslaved farm worker shows the care that Cutting lavishes not only on composition, but on every element of a recording's sound.

"I love bringing Western art-music techniques to traditional music and electric folk," she says. "Whenever there's an ensemble of people playing my charts, they're playing written charts, in the same way a symphony orchestra is playing from music. It's a very premeditated art form. It's just so rare in folk and rock. Of course, you do have your exceptions. Bill Whelan is a composer within Celtic folk, and in rock you've got people like Frank Zappa, whose charts were so difficult that he had a hard time finding musicians to stay in his band. So I'm bringing an art-music sensibility into it."

The New St. George's last recording was a demo of a Cutting composition, a song called "Forgiveness." She began writing the song during the New St. George's death throes: "While I was writing this song, 'Forgiveness,' I was really engaged in this titanic struggle to actually forgive someone. Several people. So you had at one level this struggle to eke this song out, and on another level you had this great spiritual struggle going on, because I knew, in the deepest part of myself, that I needed to learn to let go and to forgive or it would be the cause of so much unhappiness for myself and others that it would literally kill me."

Cutting laughingly admits that, despite years of spiritual work, including studying philosophers from Thich Nhat Hanh to Jean Houston, she's not "the forgiveness poster child," but she says she's made enormous progress. The combination of self-discipline and artist's insight that has helped her in her personal struggles also gave rise to the pristine, hymnlike "Forgiveness."

"Knowing that it took Jennifer so long to complete the song, and looking at the words, it's obvious to me that she edited herself severely," says Cliff. "A lot of writers don't have the discipline to write 'less.' Of course, there's a time to ramble and a time to be precise. She knows the difference."

After the death of the New St. George, Cutting struggled out of her grief far enough to submit "Forgiveness" to the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest, part of the Merle Watson Memorial Festival in North Carolina (aka MerleFest, a mecca for roots musicians). The result was a personal and professional triumph: She took first prize.

Cutting devoted a good part of the next four years to satisfying her vision of "Forgiveness." She no longer had a band to create the sound, which meant she found herself with the need--and the freedom--to choose musicians for the recording.

Cutting's roots in both traditional music and art-rock composition drew her naturally to Prior, the reigning queen of the English folk-rock world. Cutting had met Prior when Prior's band and the New St. George shared festival stages. "It took years to work it out," Cutting says, "but she wanted to sing ['Forgiveness'], and I wanted her to sing that song, and looking back I think perhaps I wrote that song for that voice. It was such a good fit. I had in mind something very majestic. And look up 'majestic' in the dictionary--it'll say 'Maddy Prior'!"

Prior was in England, not planning to come to America anytime soon. So Cutting decided to go to England. She called a local friend, guitarist John Jennings, to see whether he could recommend a guitarist for the British session, and was surprised and delighted when Jennings suggested that he go himself. He also brought in another legendary figure from the British folk-rock scene: ex-Fairport Convention drummer Dave Mattacks, who had worked with Jennings in Mary Chapin Carpenter's band.

With Jennings and members of SunSign Productions, the company she formed to produce her compositions, Cutting headed to Chipping Norton Recording Studios in Oxfordshire last August. (Her New St. George bandmate Rico Petruccelli missed the party; he recorded his "Forgiveness" bass part later, at Bias Recording Studios in Springfield, Va.) The recording session took place Aug. 11 last year--the day of a total solar eclipse.

"The country was a madhouse!" Cutting recalls. "People were swarming the countryside with cameras and microphones. And there we were, in the very private, secluded grounds of Chipping Norton Recording Studios. We shut down, went outside to watch the eclipse through our special little glasses."

Cutting is immensely pleased with the result of her international collaboration: "The joy we took in making music together translated directly onto the recording." Prior described "Forgiveness" in a letter to Cutting as "a song of great subtlety and depth with a gloriously emotive melody."

Mattacks, who has worked with everyone from Paul McCartney to Joan Armatrading, says, "I enjoyed the sessions. The combination of Jennifer Cutting's writing and direction plus John Jennings' and [my] intuitiveness towards the music--and Maddy's great vocal--got a nice result, I think."

Park Records in the U.K. will release "Forgiveness" as a track on a future Prior album. Cutting plans for it to be the final track of a SunSign-produced album involving musicians from both sides of the Atlantic. "Right now," she says, "running a fixed-lineup performing group doesn't advance my long-term goals of recording the most fully realized possible versions of my work."

Cutting won't rule out a return to performing ("She's a wonderful stage presence," Cliff says, "but that's not what's motivating her right now"); she says she values the time she spent with the New St. George. And her former lead singer admires her latest creation. "I always enjoyed singing 'Forgiveness,'" says Moscatiello, "and I think it suits Maddy's voice perfectly." CP

"Forgiveness," by the Jennifer Cutting All-Stars, is available as a CD single from SunSign Productions (www.kinesiscd.com/jennifercutting) and from the House of Musical Traditions in Takoma Park. To order, call (301) 270-9090.

Grey DeLisle, Iron Flowers

2006-08-16T15:54:00.000-07:00

From the Washington City Paper, July 15, 2005.

Iron Flowers
Grey DeLisle
Sugar Hill

Grey DeLisle may make folk music, but she doesn’t do trad. Witness the opening number of Iron Flowers, a cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that recasts the Queen epic as a slow, pedal-steel-inflected lament. On her fourth full-length, the Los Angeles singer/autoharpist/voice-over artist—she’s the speaking voice of Yumi on Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, among others—displays a bold approach that’s admirable even when it results in some execrable sounds. Take bad-girl ballad “The Bloody Bucket,” all hopped up on mandolin, stinkin’ drunk on clichés, and staggering through a wasteland of clunky syllables. “If your watered-down tequila’s fueled a thirst for stronger stuff,” the Cartoon Network– endorsed enunciator manages, “[t]hen this dark and hungry look here in my eyes might be enough.” And if it’s not enough, she’ll also offer eyes “the color of your bruised and broken soul” and the chance to “hide your drunken breath behind my tresses black as coal.” Then they dance. Apparently, when talents such as Marvin Etzioni, Murry Hammond, Dave Mattacks, and Greg Leisz—guys who’ve helped shape the sounds of Lone Justice, Old 97s, Fairport Convention, and seemingly half of the artists on Hear Music—fail, they can fail spectacularly. Usually, though, Flowers just wilts a little. The somewhat appealing “Joanna” is marred by an ersatz south-of-the-border arrangement. On the fierce “Right Now,” the little wobble in DeLisle’s soprano ought to signify vulnerability but instead suggests a poor match between singer and song. Likewise, on “Who Made You King,” DeLisle sounds as if she’s merely playing the role of a seductress—never really embodying it in the way that, say, Maria McKee would—but the song, by Etzioni and Sam Lorber, is a keeper, all smartly thwacked snare and shimmering strings. Better still is “Sweet Little Bluebird”—at least when it’s played straight: just voice, guitar, and a tale of a death-bound prisoner. Superimposing excerpts from a field recording of “Cold Iron Shackles” is plain tacky. As for “Rhapsody,” well, with a little more Scaramouch and fandango it might have worked. Still, its harsh final action, which sounds like DeLisle’s raking a nail straight up the open-tuned strings of her autoharp, gives me hope. Someday, such eccentricities might take her to where, as Ami and Yumi sing, “anything is possible.” But in a good way. —Pamela Murray Winters

UpShot by Ami Dayan

2006-08-16T15:50:00.000-07:00

From the Washington City Paper, Sept. 30, 2005.

UpShot
By Ami Dayan
Directed by Shirley Serotsky
Produced by Forum Theatre & Dance
At the Church Street Theater to Oct. 16

It happens to every critic sooner or later: You end up at a show where there are more people in the production than in the audience. Four of us came to see UpShot at a recent Sunday matinee, far fewer than Forum Theatre & Dance had mustered to mount Ami Dayan’s existentialist comedy-drama. The production itself further heightened the sense of isolation: Entering the theater, we were met with the sounds of swirling winds and the icy embrace of a well-functioning air-conditioning system. The play’s opening image is also chilling: a man—called Man—standing still, stolid-faced, on a raised block as he brings a mimed pistol to his temple and shoots. “I am speaking to you from the future,” he intones. He goes on to tell us that he’s been playing Russian roulette for years on this date—the anniversary of the day the world ended. Each year he adds a bullet to the gun; this time, the chambers are full. Cut to stage right, where, at a desk cluttered with Diet Coke, Red Bull, and a coffee cup, among other detritus, a writer in plaid pajamas frantically wars with his text. He’s John, a would-be playwright whose wife has gone back to work, soon after their child’s birth, to support him in his dream of finishing his script. It’s a heavy thing, about this last man on Earth, and John struggles to make it funny—and maybe even to make it a vehicle for the current California governor: “Existential sci-fi, live onstage, with Arnold!” he fantasizes. Playwright Dayan makes John his own best editor, allowing just enough of Man’s scenes to show their strengths and cutting them just as the weaknesses inherent in John’s premise kick in. (When Man alludes to Eden, John laments, “Everybody does the Garden! Albee, Joni Mitchell, Iron Butterfly.”) And Dayan’s shrewd pacing allows the moment when Man breaks through and begins fighting with his creator to be—well, not plausible, exactly, but close. The series of battles that ensue is heady fodder for the sort of viewer who wants to debate God vs. man, man vs. woman, art vs. life over a post-show espresso. Director Shirley Serotsky, impressively, has matched the two realistic roles (John and his wife) and one surrealistic one (Man) with actors whose styles suit the constructs. Adrienne Nelson’s Helen anchors the situation in something like the real world—though, strangely, she’s the stagiest of the trio. Jason Lott, who plays Man, is a physically eloquent actor; although Forum Theater & Dance doesn’t call upon anyone to dance here, his agility suggests he’d be well up to the task. His Man is blandly menacing and strangely engaging, even though, as he admits, “I’m an archetype.” And Scott Graham’s John progresses from a mere Matthew Broderick– like harried Everyguy to the protagonist of a spectacular scene near the end in which, “becoming” Man, he recounts that lost soul’s visit to a deserted theater: “Is anybody here? Hello? Can you hear me? Empty seats? Come, help me. Bring back, revive the souls, the spirits of those who were inside you, who sat inside you, who rubbed their life force into you.” As Graham delivered this speech, with Lott and Nelson sitting in the aisles next to us few outsiders, I felt a chill that wasn’t from the air conditioning. —Pamela Murray Winters

Richard Thompson, Front Parlour Ballads

2006-08-12T20:43:00.000-07:00

I don't write the headlines. I think my wonderful ex-editor Leonard Roberge came up with this one.

From the Washington City Paper, Aug. 19, 2005

Richard Strange
By Pamela Murray Winters

Front Parlour Ballads
Richard Thompson
Cooking Vinyl

A few years ago, I interviewed Richard Thompson for an article that was never published. Unexpectedly, the session turned into a sort of diatribe on the business the then-52-year-old had been a part of since he was a teenager in the groundbreaking British folk-rock band Fairport Convention. On being a “cult artist,” he said that two-thirds of working musicians are cult artists, because the industry doesn’t support them. He spoke at length of the arrogance of rock musicians, how they lose touch with reality. And I’m pretty sure that the words “back-stabbing bastards” were used.

“Pretty sure,” I say, because all I have now are some notes scribbled down later, after a tape-recorder malfunction. But history bears out Thompson’s disenchantment with the mainstream: Not long before the interview, he’d left longtime home Capitol Records, and since his departure, he’s released two strong, idiosyncratic, and resolutely indie studio albums, 2003’s The Old Kit Bag and the new Front Parlour Ballads.

That Thompson, in a nearly 40-year recording career, has never had a hit record is ultimately a saving grace. Already free of a sense of obligation to his audience beyond being himself, over and over, Thompson seems to have found even more freedom in departing from the style-making and profit-siphoning of the music industry. It never really knew how to market his eclectic arrangements, expressive but low-wankage guitar playing, and shy-lad persona, anyway.

Front Parlour Ballads, he’s been joking at recent shows, was made with “a minimal budget—reflected in the abysmal sound quality but not reflected in the exorbitant cover price.” He’s right about the budget, at least: The album was recorded in his garage studio, with Thompson playing, as the liner notes coyly state, “several things.” There’s only the occasional presence of percussionist Debra Dobkin to indicate something Thompson didn’t feel himself capable of doing.

“A Solitary Life,” the 11th of the disc’s 13 tracks, would seem, by title, to represent this middle-aged muso, diddling with guitars, mandolin, accordion, and sundry muses in the comfort of his own home. In fact, it’s a deceptively breezy look at the road not taken. “Sometimes I long for the solitary life,” he sings, then envisions a workaday alter ego whose career becomes less appealing, verse by verse, from “a serious hobby in the garden shed”—pretty much what Thompson himself has indulged with this album—to a death by “a steady, reliable tumour.” It’s the second-least-surprising tune on Ballads, definitely the most Dylan-influenced, and one of the most extroverted.

“Let It Blow,” the rousing opener, is the most predictable. The tale of a tabloid-grabbing romance, marriage, and divorce doesn’t have much original to offer save Thompson’s delight in his own wordplay. He puts the bride’s family in New Zealand, thus allowing someone to be “speedin’ from distant Dunedin,” but returns the failed groom to England so that, while the bride plots “revenge,” his eye can “stray to the ample bustier of a novelty dancer from Penge.” It’s a fine three-fifths of a limerick, but it wears out its welcome over the repeated listenings an album like this one demands.

Geography is always important to this California-dwelling expatriate—how must he have felt when Del McCoury, adapting his “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” for bluegrass, changed “Box Hill” to “Knoxville”? —and it’s used most effectively on Ballads in “Old Thames Side.” Here Thompson’s protagonist can pinpoint where he fell in love, as his beloved stood “by Custom House Landing/ Like Venus risen out of the water.” A song of naked emotion and breathtaking simplicity, “Old Thames Side” also contains a frequent Thompson motif, of a tongue-tied man overcome with emotion: “I searched for a phrase to capture your ways/That’s a task that will always defeat me.”

Directness and intimacy are part of the new album’s allure, which may be why “Let It Blow” makes for such a misleading leadoff. Throughout the album, Thompson’s voice often seems to be at a conversational or even confiding pitch; the instruments are freer of effects than they are in the concerts at which sound man/road manager/Ballads co-producer and mixer Simon Tassano sits behind the boards. On this collection of “small songs,” Thompson seems freer, too—to take chances, even to fail.

In contrast to the assurance with which he tackles “A Solitary Life,” “Let It Blow,” and “Old Thames Side,” he nearly falters on several attempts at art song. “How Does Your Garden Grow?”—plucked from both Satie and Sondheim—offers a melody that’s hard to follow and lyrics that don’t quite jell; right in the middle is a highly impressionistic guitar solo that’s perilously close to inaccessibility. Here, and on “Precious One,” which demands a vocal range Thompson can barely muster, you get the idea that maybe someone else ought to have been let into the garage. “Cressida,” on the other hand, is a near-perfect oratorio, constructed of single syllables, free of adjectives, embroidered by a gracefully plucked acoustic guitar, and sung in a voice that would astonish anyone who remembered the stammering boy from Fairport or the taciturn presence behind rich-throated ex-wife Linda.

In some ways, Ballads is all about finding that voice, about Thompson stretching himself—not always with complete success, but always with the raw emotion that once was present only in his electric solos. “My Soul, My Soul,” the album’s longest track at just over five-and-a-half minutes, offers all of Thompson’s gifts in fruition, even a bit of electric guitar in an otherwise all-acoustic collection. In a furious search for someone—lover, muse, goddess?—Thompson casts out seemingly random images: “The way she crimps her curls/The way she calls that hog/...The way she bangs the wall/The way she walks the dog.”

Again, words seem to defeat him as strings, accordion, and Dobkin’s tribal rhythms gallop along in some reverse hegira, a quest for a Mecca that might mean rebirth or annihilation. “She gave me my party favours,” he wails. “But nothing was sweet enough.” He caps the final word with a mad “ahhh!” Then his knife-edged electric slices through with the old Thompsonian abandon. Add in a persistent, nearly whispered chant of “My soul, my soul, my soul,” and you’ve got the stuff Thompson fans have been waiting for since his foray into Sufism 30 years ago: holy fire, earthy funk.

“Miss Patsy,” the only track on Ballads that’s really a ballad, likewise offers a questing Thompson, this time in a familiar, almost twee folky setting. In succession, our antihero is held for a ransom never paid, seduced by a religious cult, and subjected to an extreme makeover that lands him in prison. I’m not going to swear that this is a metaphorical representation of Thompson’s own career—dogged by the limitations of Fairport-style folk-rock, a too-literal approach to faith, and the cluelessness of industry weasels—but it sure makes for an intriguing pattern. “Row, Boys, Row” also suggests the demands of the “shark-filled sea” of the music business, or of any corrupt institution. “Seven years of bad luck,” Thompson sings. “Should have read the small print.”

The man who unexpectedly ranted about arrogance and backstabbing and the rest of the godawful biz is fully present here—but not with bitterness or even much regret. After all, he’s a lucky guy: He can go to his home office and turn out a narrow, deep product, with no obligation to brandish his lengthy résumé. Front Parlour Ballads is surprising, challenging, and, above all, peculiar. For Richard Thompson, that’s a fine compliment.

Tempest (Washington Post Weekend review, 2006)

2006-08-11T18:59:00.000-07:00

OK, OK, that last line is a little cheesy.

The Washington Post, Friday, August 11, 2006; Page WE10

TEMPEST "The Double-Cross" Magna Carta

STICK WITH AN UNPOPULAR style of music -- no, let's not say "unpopular"; how about "niche"? -- and there's a good chance that, sooner or later, you'll overlap the latest cultural trend. The Celtic-folk/progressive-rock group Tempest finally hits on popular relevance with "Captain Kidd," the opening track on "The Double-Cross," which the liner notes describe as "our third in a series about infamous pirates." Tempest's leader and co-composer of the song, Lief Sorbye, takes on the persona of the privateer-turned-scalawag in the lusty, string-flayed tune. The traditional "Hangman," with a brooding melody and a dark bass line, could be about Kidd's execution -- where the rope broke.

The noted British folk critic who once called the San Francisco-based band the worst in its genre must have left his sense of humor in his other anorak that day; the band takes its bombast seriously but itself less so. (It's been known to reenact a scene from "This Is Spinal Tap" onstage.) It's the sort of music the studio tends to constrain and the concert hall tends to favor. Sorbye's vocals are serviceable; his take on "Eppy Moray" can't match that of Trevor Lucas's of Fotheringay, back when Sorbye was still a school kid in Oslo, Norway, but he puts his heart into it. But Tempest's instrumentals outstrip their songs, particularly the inventive, if somewhat cheesily named, "Vision Quest," whose waves of keyboards will make Yes fans say, "Yes, please!"

--Pamela Murray Winters

Meanwhile Back at the Ranch by Kinky Friedman

2006-08-11T18:55:00.000-07:00

Publication of this review does not imply endorsement of any political candidate.

I like his books, though.

From the Washington City Paper, Sept. 27, 2002

Git Along Little...

By Pamela Murray Winters

Meanwhile Back at the Ranch
By Kinky Friedman
Simon & Schuster, 200 pp., $24

One of the attractions of series fiction is that the reader can return to a familiar community. The novels of country-singer-turned-novelist Kinky Friedman, which feature country-singer-turned-detective Kinky Friedman (for clarity, let's call the latter fellow by one of his nicknames, the Kinkstah), feature fictional versions of Friedman's real-life loved ones, from Willie Nelson--Friedman's "Village Irregular" fans include many celebrities--to his own family. In Friedman's 15th mystery, Meanwhile Back at the Ranch, these cronies--save Steve Rambam, a private investigator in both real and fictional lives--are scarce. Still, Friedman proves himself loyal to both readers and friends--the man's-best-friend kind in particular--by offering quality time up front with his most beguiling, and beguilingly described, recurring character, the Kinkstah's longtime live-in feline companion:

"It's almost good to be alive," I said, paraphrasing my father.

The cat did not respond. She did not believe in paraphrasing anybody. If a cat can't quote things precisely, the cat nearly always prefers to remain silent. If people pursued this same feline wisdom there'd be a lot fewer misunderstandings, a lot fewer wars, and a lot fewer people ripping off Oscar Wilde at cocktail parties.

The Kinkstah, who lives in a West Village walk-up, is a hard-boiled good egg, a guy who barks into the blower "Start talkin'," brags about his morning tent pole, and goes into his rain room to take "a Nixon"--but gets all Doris Day when it comes to critters. Faced in this book with two cases--a missing person and a missing pussy--he's much more interested in finding the cat.

The missing person is an 11-year-old autistic boy, whose only word is the enigmatic "Shnay." The Kinkstah's initial investigation leads him to the boy's bickering parents and dishy half-sister ("It was a rather sad commentary, I reflected, that while Dylan's parents were hoping against hope that I would find their son, I was already halfway hoping that I could hose their daughter"). But it's a halfhearted hard-on; a third of the way through the book, he hands the case off to Rambam, who of course gets the girl himself (with his "patented kosher meat injection"--eeeww!), and heads to Texas to investigate the disappearance of a three-legged cat named Lucky from an animal-rescue center (a real place: see www.utopiarescue.com).

This visit spurs some uncharacteristic mawkishness from Friedman:

Surely the whole world was a rescue ranch, I thought. Everyone was busy trying to save something. Some people saved money. Some spent their time attempting to save other people's souls. A few endeavored to save the lives of other creatures on the planet. A few even tried to save the planet. But the inexorable truth was that nothing could ever be truly saved. Like love, it could only be given.

But he saves himself from inexorable bathos by beginning the next paragraph: "There were large quantities of dried cat vomit on the living room floor of the lodge."

Still, Ranch could use more raunch--more of the stinky juices of life, fewer of the misty mind-clouds. There are fewer menacing figures, grievous wounds, and big guns here than in your average Nancy Drew, let alone your average Friedman novel, and the perpetually horny, only occasionally lucky Kinkstah gets even less action than usual. (The only creature that gets cozy with his wedding tackle is a sleeping tomcat.) And Friedman the author lets Friedman the gumshoe wrap up one of the two cases by a bit of half deduction, half deus ex machina that even fellow wiseass/softy Tom Robbins wouldn't sink to.

Whereas Friedman offerings such as Greenwich Killing Time and Armadillos & Old Lace are chock-full of laughs and wordplay, Ranch makes it seem as if Friedman's reservoirs are a little low. (Or maybe he's just happy. When Spanking Watson was released, in 1999, Friedman told an interviewer, "At the moment, the books I'm writing, each one seems to be the best one. All I have to do is continue to be unhappy and I'll be fine.")

Don't read Ranch for the plot--or if you do, don't read the book jacket, which blabs three-quarters of the story. Read it for the milder-than-usual but still-welcome laughs ("The rhythm of the falling rain sounded like Neil Sedaka had been bugled to Jesus and had come back outside my kitchen window to play my fire escape like a xylophone"), the inventive urban legends (Asperger's syndrome as Nazi curse? The Three Stooges as Brooklyn building contractors?), and the useful advice from a highly irregular friend:

Never attempt to remove cat vomit, or cat turds for that matter, from any object until the particular detritus in question has fully dried....Just take the object, in this case the boot, out into the sunshine and let it dry naturally.

Coffee and Cigarettes

2006-08-11T18:50:00.000-07:00

From the Washington City Paper, May 21, 2004

Coffee and Cigarettes
Directed by Jim Jarmusch

Good thing Coffee and Cigarettes is art-house fare, or the folks over at Smoke Free Movies, whose Web site decries onscreen smoking as a “deadly assault on a rising generation worldwide,” would be masticating their carrot sticks all to hell. Still, an early tableau of five coffee cups and a dish full of butts seguing into a close-up of Roberto Benigni’s twitchy face might be enough to scare the kiddies straight. Jim Jarmusch’s 11 conversational vignettes, which originated as a Benigni/Steven Wright short for Saturday Night Live in 1986 and were shot at various times over the next 17 years, portray the title substances as, for good or ill, social lubricants. In “Those Things’ll Kill Ya,” the aptly named Joe (Joe Rigano) empties his cup even as he hectors Vinny (Vinny Vella) about smoking. In “Somewhere in California,” Tom (Tom Waits) and Iggy (Iggy Pop) both claim to have kicked the cancer-stick habit—which leads Tom to grab a pack and declare, “Now that I’ve quit, I can have one.” And in “Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil,” well, that’s pretty much what happens to the White Stripes: Here, coffee and cigarettes are incidental to the demonstration of Jack’s “acoustical resonance” device. The film’s strongest segment, “Cousins?” offers pleasures that are subtler still, as two Brits in L.A. (Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan) sip tea as an accompaniment to their delightfully squirmy meeting. Molina and Coogan are brilliant as a little-known actor and a supercilious It Boy, respectively, in a story about cravings and connections—a phrase which, come to think of it, would make a perfect title for Jarmusch’s slight but exquisitely rendered visual medley. With Frederick Elwes’ and other cinematographers’ repeated shots of checkered tablecloths topped with mugs and ashtrays and Jarmusch’s script’s echoing phrases and ideas—the relationship of music and medicine, the notion of caffeine popsicles—Coffee and Cigarettes offers the mildly intoxicating pleasure of a dream.

—Pamela Murray Winters

Jim White, Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See

2006-08-11T18:46:00.000-07:00

From the Washington City Paper, Aug. 13, 2004

Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See

Jim White

Luaka Bop

I’ve spent a good bit of the summer reading Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find it on Jim White’s reading list, as well. The songwriter and multi-instrumentalist—raised in Pensacola, Fla., the reputed American leader in churches per capita—named his 1997 Luaka Bop debut Wrong-Eyed Jesus, and on his most recent release, Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See, he still won’t leave the Lord alone. Over 10 tracks of Flannery O’Connor–infected Americana, White uses God for a Cyrano, in “That Girl From Brownsville Texas” (“Lord I might finally be willing to become the religious fool you always wanted me to be...if in return we could just tell that girl I’m the man you and me both know I ain’t”); gets fatalistic, in “Phone Booth in Heaven (“[Y]ou can’t mend what the Good Lord designed to be broken”); and muses, in “If Jesus Drove a Motor Home,” over holy transportation: “If Jesus drove a motor home, and he come to your town, would you try to talk to him?” He even meets his savior in the form of a “blue hair comb with a busted tooth” in the jubilant “Combing My Hair in a Brand New Style.” We’ve heard this tricked-out gospel imagery before, but White’s hick-hop arrangement (real, nonsynth horns, funky keyboards, wandering mouth harp) and church-whispery vocals testify that his heart’s been truly moved—and your hips may be, as well. White likewise bridges the gap between artifice and emotion with that husky storyteller’s tone in the sublime, Iron and Wine–like banjo tale “Borrowed Wings”; he and guest Susie Ungerleider (Oh Susanna) give voice to a sorta-dead couple who steal the transport of “sweet-dreaming angels” but can’t travel beyond Earth. White is himself in a sort of limbo on this atmospheric collection (elegantly produced by White and Joe Henry): He loves to play with Southern Gothic trappings, but he’s preaching to be loved as much as depicting haints and demons. The opening track is a case in point: Although he evokes Bone Machine–era Tom Waits with the percussive shuffle and eerie synths at the opening of “Static on the Radio,” and the counterpoint of steady drum-and-rattle rhythms and wide-open wails continues throughout the track, the vocals could just as well be Mark Knopfler or David Gray. Even though the song finds him sitting in his truck outside the Sunday service, musing “Ten years ago I might have joined in...for all my ruminations I can’t change a thing,” “Static,” with Aimee Mann singing backup on the catchy chorus, might well represent White’s most fervent prayer: a chance to find a mainstream audience.

—Pamela Murray Winters

Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett

2006-08-11T18:43:00.000-07:00

From the Washington City Paper, July 23, 2004

Codependent Some More

By Pamela Murray Winters

Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

By Ann Patchett

Harper Collins, 258 pp., $23.95

At a religious retreat at a ski lodge one winter of my adolescence, a minister led a discussion of the story of the prodigal son: Which of its characters did we most take to heart? As one well-scrubbed Bethesda teen after another told of her own downfall (pot smoking, necking, dropping out of poms) and prodigal-like rebirth through Jesus, I squirmed in my off-brand flares, awaiting my turn. I was an outsider, brought by a friend, and I set myself apart further by identifying with the prodigal’s goody-goody brother. “I’m glad the son was forgiven and all,” I said, “but it just seems like the story is giving people license to sin just so they can come back and get glory for turning good again.”

OK, so I was a prig. But I think Ann Patchett, whose Truth & Beauty: A Friendship recounts the bond between a Catholic-girl shepherd and a black-tarred sheep, would understand. At least I hope she would.

Ann was friends, for a couple of decades, with Lucy Grealy. The two became roommates at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1985, after knowing each other slightly at Sarah Lawrence. Which is to say that Ann knew Lucy—everyone knew Lucy—in college, but Ann’s only memory of an interaction with her was of the time Lucy pretty much snubbed her in the cafeteria. But when Lucy needs a place to stay in Iowa, who makes all the arrangements for her? Ann. Who listens to her sexual revelations, delivered as lectures? “I would make her a bowl of Cream of Wheat while she talked about pornography, fetish, and whatever had happened the night before,” writes Ann, patiently. Who cleans up half-eaten plates of spaghetti left on the floor? One guess.

The love between the burgeoning writers seems like the deep, inexplicable connection between twins: born of propinquity, ultimately as endangered by personal differences as enriched by them. The Iowa apartment becomes a womb, where these writers- and women-in-training read aloud to one another, deal with housework (one by doing it, the other by ignoring it), and dance in the kitchen:

No matter how dismal things seemed, ungraded papers, brutal weather, we could find the energy to spin around the table under the bright fluorescent lights of our apartment. Lucy was a brilliant dancer and I was tireless in my efforts to imitate her. “Just concentrate on the waist down,” she said. “Take it half a body at a time.”...She moved like water, the embodiment of easy rhythmic confidence, while I hung against the wall.

Lucy’s ease in her body was all the more remarkable for her struggle with it. At the age of 9, she was diagnosed with a malignant tumor of the jaw, one that, statistically, should have killed her—and if it didn’t, the years of crude radiation and chemical treatments might well have. Her face was repeatedly altered, throughout her short life, by surgeries meant to replace her jaw and allow her to have a full set of teeth, to close her mouth, to kiss. The small, slender Lucy seemed stunted by the early trauma—an unplanned pregnancy surprised her because she didn’t expect to be able to become pregnant. Her sometimes childlike emotions were overtaxed by a struggle to understand whether her problems were caused by her face or by something else.

“Enormity,” a word often misused, is an apt one for Lucy’s burden. She had enough success as a poet that she became part of, with novelist Ann, the “Gravy Train”: “[W]e would systematically work our way through just about every perk that was available to us,” Patchett writes of Yaddo, the Bunting Fellowship, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the other havens available to the right applicants. Lucy’s 1994 memoir, Autobiography of a Face, which transcends the survivor-story stereotype to examine what it means to be known by others, was a critical triumph and brought her fame on the talk-show circuit. But her medical trials continued, bringing more and more physical and psychic pain. She despaired of lasting love, giving herself over to transient sexual encounters and ruthlessly judging the long-term lovers who might have provided some solace.

Had she accepted them as fully as she accepted friends like Ann, she might have broken them down over time, worn them as thin as Ann by the time she discovered that Lucy, now in her late 30s, was using heroin: “I can’t stand this,” she tells Lucy over dinner in a restaurant. “All these years I’ve watched these things hurt you, things you had no control over, and now to have to watch you hurt yourself, it’s too much for me.” But ultimately, it doesn’t drive her away; a few months after the encounter in the cafe, when Lucy is miserable in a new Brooklyn apartment, Ann orders an entire kitchen setup to be delivered to her: “It was my own special brand of insanity that made me think the trials of Lucy’s life could somehow be eased by the order of Tupperware.”

Ann’s brand of insanity—that’s the only area in which Truth & Beauty lacks depth. So intent is Patchett on showcasing her brilliant, doomed friend that she skimps on her own story. Her references to her own failed relationships are glossed over with far less detail than she lavishes on Lucy’s lovers. And there’s more than a whiff of passive-aggressive anger here and there. In one incident, after Lucy’s memoir has been released to great acclaim, Ann publishes her second novel: “In the same way all the rumblings that preceded Autobiography of a Face made it clear that it was going to be a big book, the comparative silence surrounding this novel made it clear that it was going to sink without a trace....When I was scheduled to give a reading in New York, Lucy suggested that we team up, appear as a double bill...” Ann examines Lucy’s motive: “She was my best friend, and she was lending me the brilliance of her light in a moment when things were looking decidedly dull for me.” The party, of course, ends up being all about Lucy: “[W]e went and sat together at a table where Lucy signed a seemingly endless number of books and I signed a handful.”

Thus do Lucy’s “generous” gestures often seem to be ploys for attention. And the endearments in her chatty letters to Ann are as much about love of words as love of a friend: “Dearest Anngora, my cynical pirate of the elusive heart, my self winding watch, my showpiece, my shoelace, how are you?” When, near the end of her life, Lucy tells her, “[A]t least I can make you feel like a saint. That’s what you’ve always wanted,” Ann is quietly furious—and Lucy is in a “fog of morphine”—but it seems like a declaration that’s been a long time in coming. Patchett the writer backs away from it; Patchett the bereaved woman may well be kept awake at night by it. Perhaps her book, written little over a year after Lucy’s death, may have just come too soon.

Because of Lucy’s wild spirit and obvious artistic gifts, and because of the love that brims from Patchett’s writing even when exasperation, anger, self-doubt, and self-effacement color it as well, Truth & Beauty is ultimately a heartbreaker. It ends with the death that would seem to have been dogging Lucy since childhood finally coming to waltz her off at age 39. But it’s not all one dismal slog toward the grave, any more than real life is. It’s full of delightful quips: Talking about the grim Iowa weather, Lucy observes, “I always wanted one of those ankles that predicted weather....Or an elbow. A snow elbow.” Humor turns to wrenching pain in the story of Lucy’s personal-ad date with a major political dreamboat; it seems to be worth no more than a cocktail-party anecdote until someone suggests that the reason there were “no sparks” was Lucy’s face. Ann’s entanglement with a putative mentor is described with a comic lightness that leans on her own naiveté—but the incident comes in the midst of one of Lucy’s medical crises and, of course, is trumped by it.

Near the end of Autobiography of a Face, Lucy wrote: “[I]t suddenly occurred to me that it is no mistake when sometimes in films and literature the dead know they are dead only after being offered that most irrefutable proof: they can no longer see themselves in the mirror.” Her longing for that annihilation of the surface, that removal of the glass we see in, darkly, was not a longing for death, but death brought about the freedom she craved; in her essays and poems, and in her friend’s merciless yet loving account, she endures as far more than just another face. As a story of Lucy Grealy, Truth & Beauty is the equal of Grealy’s own work. As a story of a friendship, it is lacking: It leaves the other friend—the prodigal’s long-suffering sister—behind the veil.

Circumference of a Squirrel

2006-08-11T18:39:00.000-07:00

From the Washington City Paper, Oct. 24, 2003

Circumference of a Squirrel
By John Walch
Directed by Keith Bridges
At the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts to Nov. 2

Chris Stezin is the Jimmy Stewart of local theater: so genial and commonplace-good-looking and soft-spoken that you can forgive his characters a few quirks. He doesn't so much disappear into John Walch's one-man Circumference of a Squirrel—about a man's love-hate thing with the family Sciuridae—as make it his own, to the point that you'd be inclined to call him Chester if you ran into him in McPherson Square. Chester begins his story in such an urban park, watching a squirrel carrying a bagel, and that sight proves a jumping-off point for a reminiscence that includes family tragicomedy—think Jean Shepherd meets Sam Shepard—lost romance, and more symbols than are really necessary. In the Charter Theatre's production, Thom Seymour's efficient set and subtle lighting design and Keith Bridges' graceful blocking help Stezin move back and forth through time, from a childhood incident in which his father is injured by a furry yard pest, through a grad-school romance with a woman his dad is poised to hate as much as squirrels, to his at-loose-ends present. Along the way, there are tire swings, Christmas wreaths, wedding rings, doughnuts, and literal as well as metaphoric Life Savers—a series of rings for Chester and his father to grasp. Stezin—the company's associate artistic director and the actor/writer whose Charter scripts include What Dogs Do and the Helen Hayes-nominated Hoboken Station—handles Walch's sometimes outsize symbology and rich poetry with his usual down-to-earth accessibility. In uttering such gems as the description of a trapped squirrel, "eyes as wide open as the two O's in the word 'horror,'" he never pauses to congratulate himself; rather, he continues his audience chat-up with as natural a presence as the monologue structure allows. Even when the imagery feels forced—a dying man watching Wheel of Fortune—Stezin just experiences his way through it. And even when the script goes way over into creepiness, with an anecdote that suggests either a bout of magic realism on Walch's part or a case of psychosis on Chester's, Stezin's utter sincerity lets it go on by; if we don't really believe what he's saying, we believe he believes it. During a halting tale of a lengthy death, Stezin pauses at one point to sit down, and only a critic would notice that this actor is better at poising himself on a chair and drinking a bottle of juice than a lot of board-treaders are at Hamlet. It's a mesmerizing performance.—Pamela Murray Winters

Delaney Williams

2006-08-11T18:36:00.000-07:00

One of my favorites among my own stories.

From the Washington City Paper, April 4, 2003

Fat Chances

Are there no small parts? Ask Delaney Williams, who is no small actor.

By Pamela Murray Winters

Delaney Williams isn't a star yet, but some people know who he is. "Black guys, 18 to 49, always recognize me," he says. "I'm in Target or someplace, and a 30-year-old black man will look at me: 'You're the fat fuck!'" He shrugs. "'Yeah, fat fuck, that's me.'"

Williams, 40, plays Sgt. Jay Landsman on HBO's David Simon-penned crime drama The Wire, which is filming its second season. It's the highest-profile role in his acting career to date, and it's an unusual challenge for the former stage actor.

"He's a peripheral character," says Williams of the bullish Landsman, who's usually confined to walking through the squad room, sandwich in hand, and needling renegade detective Jimmy McNulty (series star Dominic West). "The story's about the investigation that's out there. You have to live an entire life in the 13 seconds you're conveying the information you have to convey."

We're having lunch on the Wire soundstage, a former Wal-Mart warehouse in East Baltimore. Later, after a day spent learning lines, dealing with wardrobe and makeup ("I think you're going to get a haircut," coos a production assistant, running her fingers through Williams' already short locks), and a whole lot of waiting around, Williams will shoot a couple of scenes in the squad room. A few takes of each and he's done with work on two episodes.

In the first scene he films, when the light outside the squad room suggests midday but the real outdoors is long dark, Landsman rags on McNulty about his latest unpleasant detail: harbor patrol ("Hey, Gilligan!"). Cheerful and professional throughout, Williams seems to relish his contribution to the world of fat-fuckdom. Looking at his lines for a later scene, he cracks, "The only place I eat is here. Every time I open a script."

Williams sits at the desk across from McNulty's and offers me his on-screen colleague's chair. "I play a lot of cops," he says.

This jibes with my recollection of the guy I knew, from a distance, as Bill Delaney: the Russian constable in Montgomery Blair High School's 1978 production of Fiddler on the Roof.

"That was the first of many cop roles," Williams says, laughing. "I did an episode of The District earlier this season for CBS where I played a captain in the Park Police. It just seems like...that's part of my selling point as an actor, I guess, that I play those roles."

Seeing him in The Wire's debut run last year, I recognized my schoolmate instantly. He's a little older and a little larger: 6 feet tall, according to his résumé, and 280 pounds. He's been mistaken at least once for George Wendt.

"I grew into this face; I grew into the characters that I could play," observes Williams, who was still treading the boards long after I gave up any hope of rising beyond a solo in a Fiddler dream sequence. "I would tend to say that I've stuck with it the whole time without risking it," he says. "I guess I chose not to live in a sixth-floor walk-up with nine other people in SoHo 20 years ago. I made that choice. I stayed here, I took classes, I did stage work when I could, I got a day job."

In fact, Williams spent 10 years as a bank manager. "It paid what it pays," he recalls. "It's not horrible, but it's not brilliant, either. But it's work that would have killed me if I stayed another 10 years. The whole time, my interest did not lie there, and I'm sure my bosses knew. I did what I had to do, and the place ran well, and it was one of those things that accomplished what it accomplished."

All the while, he worked in local theater, acting for Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth, Signature, and, he says, "pretty much every...small theater in town." He gave it up, in part, to spend more time with his family in Silver Spring: Television work, unlike theater work, allows for weekends off. His credits now include the John Waters films Cecil B. DeMented and Pecker, Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, and Chris Rock's new Head of State. Williams will soon begin work on the John Travolta project Ladder 49.

Williams remains unconvinced that it would have made much difference in the long run if he'd thrown himself headlong into acting once he left school. "I'm not sure that I could have worked as much as I work now, and as much as I'll work in the future...because of the characters I play," he says. "I don't think that you're looking for the 20-year-old with the 40-year-old's face and body. You're looking for the 40-year-olds to do that. They had 40-year-olds when I was 20. They didn't need me.

"I'm hitting my stride now," he adds. "It's like an overnight thing that took 20 years to do."

Jay Landsman, the real cop of that name, appears in the first sentence of Simon's classic Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets:

Pulling one hand from the warmth of a pocket, Jay Landman squats down to grab the dead man's chin, pushing the head to one side until the wound becomes visible as a small, ovate hole, oozing red and white. "Here's your problem," he said. "He's got a slow leak."...

They give him a gun, a badge and sergeant's stripes, and deal him out into the streets of Baltimore...Then they surround him with a chorus of blue-jacketed straight men and let him play the role of the lone, wayward joker that somehow slipped into the deck....Jay Landsman, who as a Southwestern patrolman parked his radio car at Edmonson and Hilton, then used a Quaker Oatmeal box covered in aluminum foil as a radar gun.

"Jay's one of my favorite detectives that I followed in Homicide," says Simon. "He's a consummate survivor. He understood how to run a squad and survive—how to deal with the bosses, how to get to the end of the year and clear cases."

The real Landsman is now a corporal in the Baltimore County Police Department, while his fictional counterpart intercedes between The Wire's Maj. William Rawls (John Doman) and the homicide detectives. The office politics are part of the series' overriding theme, which Simon describes as "how individuals endure, or fail to endure, within institutions." Season 1 pitted the Baltimore cops against drug lords and their minions in a slow-building story line that explored the moral ambiguity of both groups.

"These are people in an institution that is malevolent," says Simon of his fictional force. "This is not a healthy police department. Jay's in that world and perceives it for what it is. It doesn't make him noble, but it does make him astute—and it does make him a survivor."

Williams himself is reluctant to describe his character. "As an actor," he begins uneasily, "the way I approach it is, I have to like the person because I have to play the person—I have to be the person who's making these choices because he wants to make these choices....So I can't analyze the character and say, 'He's being a jerk here, and selfish there.' I can't ascribe necessarily negative things, because I have to play those actions."

OK, then how did Landsman come across last season? "A little bit of a buffoon, maybe. A smartass. I think well-meaning," Williams says. "But certainly a kiss-ass. That's the No. 1 trait that's important to the show." He gestures around the squad room. "There's Rawls over here and McNulty over here. Or there's upper brass over here and there's the squad detectives over here. There's the guy who's in between, surviving by keeping these guys from killing each other—and in the end, keeping his place."

"Jay sees the landscape as others can't. He is in no way the foolish Falstaff of the unit," says Simon, who hired Williams for The Wire after seeing him in a previous Simon-does-gritty-Bawlmer series, The Corner. "It was only a line or two," he says, "but he captured it brilliantly and really captured the moment. So when I wrote the character of Jay Landsman, I had Bill in mind."

But Williams wasn't the only actor who auditioned, says Simon: "I also read the real Jay Landsman. But I ended up saying to him, 'You're good, but you're no Jay Landsman.'"

The women on the Wire set love Williams. "He's so funny!" is often their first response when asked about him. Gabbing with a stand-in during the long wait before he enters the squad room, Williams jokes about the tough time women have choosing between him and pretty-boy West.

Back in the squad room, where I'm still a little star-struck that I'm sitting in West's chair, I'm also interested in this man whose success in getting roles on the basis of how he looks must be as much curse as blessing. I ask, cautiously, "Have there ever been roles you wanted that you couldn't get because you didn't have the right look?"

"Well, every single role out there, ever," Williams replies before trailing off. "People used to say, 'What type are you?' And I'd say, 'Think of Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, some dashing young leading man.' Because—" He makes a dismissive sound. "Those same roles? Us fat, ugly people can do that, too. And do, in the real world. We live our lives. But that's not what's bought. That's not a commodity that's out there. I understand that....I get it all the time: 'What role do you want to play onstage?' Like, Hamlet! I'm a 40-year-old fat man. I'm not gonna play Hamlet. I wasn't gonna play Hamlet as a 20-year-old fat man. But I'm never gonna get that chance. But why wouldn't I want to do that?

"I always thought I'd be able to choose what I wanted to do," he continues. "Unless you produce, that's not always the case. And even when I have nailed auditions for parts and I'm sitting across from the people making the decision, and they're like...'We're gonna just prepare the contract, and it'll be on your desk'—and then the phone doesn't ring. There's something else going on."

So he's not auditioning for Hamlet, but if you need a funny guy to lift a refrigerator or swagger around a crime scene, he'll be there. "I've lived a lot of experiences by going, Eh, that's not going to happen," he says. "That's maybe my nature as well as driven by the fact that I look like I look or am who I am. But [there are] those times where you grab the bull by the horn a little bit: 'Hey, come with me, bull.' And the bull comes. And you go, Shit, that wasn't so hard. I'll grab the next bull, too."

James McMurtry, St. Mary of the Woods

2006-08-11T18:33:00.000-07:00

Washington City Paper, Oct. 18, 2002

Saint Mary of the Woods
James McMurtry
Sugar Hill

With his first album, 1989's Too Long in the Wasteland, James McMurtry created the template that he has followed his whole musical career: a guitar-based country sound, less Nash Vegas and more Nashbury Park; elegant, laconic wordsmithery about a young man's fear of growing older and a country boy's chafing at small-town smallness even as he enjoys the view. Saint Mary of the Woods, McMurtry's sixth release, is the first of his albums that he's produced himself, taking the reins from such old pros as John Mellencamp, Don Dixon, and Lloyd Maines. It shows that the Texan has finally grown into his darkly nostalgic Western wear; at 40, he's now old enough to credibly look homeward. Saint Mary is a mature, refined album of diverse, sometimes humorous, sometimes gloomy portraits. Granted, they're studio portraits, for good or ill. The elegiac title track, for example, portrays a shattered diva ("Where are you going/Brandy on your breath/Bottle's open, spilled across the desk/Snifter's broken, smashed against the wall") from a literary distance: McMurtry's slightly hangdog baritone and the shimmering, Pro Tooled setting keep the listener out of harm's way. The fuzzed-up "Lobo Town" cuts to the diagnosis right off the bat ("Grand Daddy's good name/Fits like a shackle and a chain") and then catalogs the sickness of a drugged-up rich boy with a 2/4 beat that keeps things moving along as gracefully as McMurtry's narrative skill. It's worth noting that McMurtry seldom bothers to sing; his metier is a Lou Reed-ish patter that hits a deadpan precision. He doesn't sound as if he doesn't believe the stories he tells--which is probably why they're so easy to enjoy. Even when he rhapsodizes about a pair of kissing cousins on the rockabilly family-reunion epic "Choctaw Bingo," it's amusing rather than appalling: "I want to get between 'em/With a great big ol' hard-on like a old Bois d'Arc fence post/You could hang a pipe-rail gate from/Do some sister twisters 'til the cows come home." Indeed, the singer is so entertaining that I figure his shallow shadow brother is due for at least as much of a good time as McMurtry gives us with his tales. --Pamela Murray Winters