country music

Stayin’ alive with Kris Kristofferson

Jim

“It was like death. Closest thing to dyin’ that I know of.”

I’ve never forgotten Muhammad Ali’s words, softly spoken in utter exhaustion following his epic 1975 Thrilla in Manilla fight with Joe Frazier. They resonated again at City Winery Sunday, April 30 after Kris Kristofferson’s third of three nights.

I don’t mean them about Kris, at least not healthwise. Yes, he’s lost much of his memory, as has been widely reported over the last few years. I can’t say for sure he even remembers me and I’ve been blessed to be friends with him a long time, counting my liner notes to his 2004 two-disc The Essential Kris Kristofferson compilation among my proudest career achievements.

But I can say that he puts on a pretty good front, letting you know right off that his memory is shot—like Ali, “too many blows to the head,” he says, having boxed and played football and rugby in his younger years. And I can also say he’s never sounded better, at least from the show I saw—and I hadn’t seen him sing a whole show probably in five years at least, though I did see him have a blast singing a Beatles song three years ago at a Beatles tribute event the night before the Grammy Awards in L.A.

I say he’s never sounded better, though I should put that in context: He’s a great singer in my estimation, and I love his voice—but I wouldn’t say he has a great voice, not in the manner of traditional pop singers like Sinatra, say, or that he sings like, say, his fellow country outlaw Johnny Paycheck.

I once saw Paycheck do a show, maybe 15 years ago at Country Music Fan Fair in Nashville, with Merle Haggard and George Jones. Jones, of course, is considered by many to be the greatest country singer ever, with Haggard perhaps a close second. Well let me tell you, no one put more heart into his voice than Johnny Paycheck—and no one has more heart, period, than Kris Kristofferson.

It’s like Dylan. From the start of his career, understandably, he was labeled, wrongly, as someone who “couldn’t sing,” who didn’t have “a good voice.” I think both might apply to Dylan today, but back at his height, I’d say he had a unique voice and a highly original vocal style that was certainly “singing” of the highest order. And there are those, too, who discount Elvis Costello, who is in fact a great pop singer, for his vocal timbre, really, which is a solely a matter of taste.

As for Kris, I wouldn’t say he was a “soul singer” because of its R&B connotations, i.e., Otis Redding he ain’t. But I can say that no one sings with more soul–in addition to heart—as Kris Kristofferson. And no, he doesn’t stay on a note long, but he always hits it.

All this was apparently lost by a Chicago reviewer who savaged his recent show there, as I learned backstage. This made my blood boil, both by itself and for conjuring up the memory of another scathing review many years ago in The New York Post of a show that I was at, written by a reviewer who got Kristofferson when he apparently expected Caruso. And it being the Post, the guy was clearly a flaming right-winger put off by Kris’s saintly humanitarianism.

Not to keep harping on it, but no, Kris isn’t a mellifluous singer, then again, neither is Rod Stewart, to mention another great singer with a raspy voice. But in fairness to the Chicago critic, who complained about his “ravaged…weather-beaten” sound—the highest compliment, as far as I’m concerned–maybe he did in fact catch a bad show, though I can’t imagine it.

I mentioned Johnny Paycheck. Kris actually evoked for me, Johnny Paycheck’s greatest performance—his last substantial hit, “Old Violin,” which reached No. 21, country, in 1986. The song is essentially a reflection on a life given to music and a realization that the end is near, indeed, in Paycheck’s deliverance, the closest thing on record to dyin’ that I know of.

And yes, Kris is now 80, 81 next month. Paycheck, Haggard and Jones are gone, same with Kris’s friends and contemporaries Roger Miller, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash. All that’s left from that generation now is pretty much him and Willie Nelson.

But like I said, Chicago notwithstanding, Kris has never sounded better—again, within context. Still movie star handsome if more grizzled than last I saw him, he opened with “Shipwrecked in the Eighties,” a song thematically similar to “Old Violin” in that it now dawns on the singer that he’s “lost and alone in deep water,” not knowing “how much longer there is to go on.”

True, compared to its initial release on his 1986 album Repossessed, his voice has aged to go with the lyrics—making them all that much more affecting. And he played fine on guitar and harmonica, such that when he finished, the sold-out City Winery crowd, enrapt in dead silence, erupted into applause.

“That’s a lot to live up to!” he said, then proceeded to do so in a set (with brief intermission) that pretty much ran the gamut of his truly legendary career, each song its own high point.

I want to say here that Kris is one of my four favorite lyricists, the others being Hal David, Nick Ashford, David Johansen. And he’s so much, much more than one of the most famous lines in music: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” from “Me and Bobby McGee,” which he sang, of course. “And there’s nothing short of dyin’/That’s half as lonesome as the sound/Of the sleeping city sidewalk/And Sunday morning coming down” comes to mind every Sunday morning, as does “cleanest dirty shirt” (both from “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” which he also sang). Or “ain’t it just like a human,” followed by the title line “Here comes that rainbow again”—and the title of the most beautiful “Loving Her was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again).”

I’m partial too, to “Jesus was a Capricorn”‘s “Everybody’s gotta have somebody to look down on/Who they can feel better than at any time they please/Someone doin’ somethin’ dirty decent folks can frown on/If you can’t find nobody else, then help yourself to me.” He sang that, but not the most powerful title in his songbook, “They Killed Him,” also about Jesus, and Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and “the brothers Kennedy.” The chorus: “My God, they killed him!” Dylan covered it on his 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded.

I don’t know about Chicago, but man, there’s just so much in a Kris Kristofferson show.

“You paid a lot to watch some old fart play,” Kris said to the audience, almost apologetically. They would have none of it.

Lisa, Kris’s most wonderful wife, let me sit on a stool on the stage against a side wall, well out of view of most of the audience. Rosanne Cash had sat there the first night. An old girlfriend, sitting at the other end of the stage, was able to get a great picture. She said it looked like Rose was crying. I know there were times two nights later when I was.


(Photo: Cathryn Levan)

It reminded me a bit of watching Paycheck at the Grand Ole Opry. I was lucky to see him there a number of times. I always used to hang out backstage in various dressing rooms–Porter Wagoner’s, Roy Acuff’s, Bill Anderson’s, Jimmy C. Newman’s, Grandpa Jones’s, Riders in the Sky’s. The amazing thing, though, was whenever Paycheck played, everyone backstage—artists, friends, family, Opry hands—they all came out to watch. Paycheck was that powerful. That deep. People were dumbstruck watching him, now a physical shell of what he was–he suffered from emphysema and looked tiny–and singing from the pit and then rushing off to his bus to get hooked up to an oxygen tank.

But like I said, Kris looks great. Ellen Burstyn, who won the Best Actress Oscar opposite Kris in the 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, was there. She’d actually never seen Kris play and warmly embraced him after. She looked great, too, and I was suitably starstruck. After she left I brought up Ali, since Port Authority had an exhibition of Ali photos a couple months back, one of them with Ali and Kris. Lisa said how Ali and his wife had visited them in Hawaii, that Ali “was a man among men.” We all lamented his passing, and that of his best friend and our dear friend, Howard Bingham, the great photographer.

And of course we mourned John Trudell. I’d put John up there with Kris as a lyricst, though his songs were more spoken-word poetry set to music. I was lucky to know him a little, whereas Kris wrote “Johnny Lobo” about him and extolls him in “Wild American” ahead of Steve Earle, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. He also appears in the 2005 Trudell documenary.

Apropos of all this, Lisa said something else, that stuck with me: “We’re all dying.”

She said it with the brightest, warmest smile, the same one that accompanies just about everything she says. It was like, “Big deal. So what?”

I suppose we’re all shipwrecked in the eighties, those of us who are our age. For sure I know I am (see “Cancer Funnies”). I guess at this point, it all comes down to the way we go out.

Luckily for all of us, Kris is alive and well—well enough to have a new record out (last year’s Grammy-nominated double-disc The Cedar Creek Sessions, not to mention last year’s The Complete Monument & Columbia Album Collection box set) and even a new movie in the forthcoming western Hickok, about Wild Bill (he plays George Knox, the mayor who hires Wild Bill as town marshall).

Lisa said that they were now living the “senior dream,” traveling the country in a tour bus to concert stops, for Kris loves to play. We all walked out, but Kris graciously stopped to sign autographs for everyone still waiting outside. It was chilly and approaching midnight.

I walked to the subway, carrying a bottle of the Kris Kristofferson commemorative wine that City Winery made up for the special occasion. Running through my mind was one last lyric, from “Best of All Possible Worlds,” that Kris sang an hour or so earlier.

“And I don’t need this town of yours more than I’ve never needed nothing else/Cause there’s still a lotta drinks that I ain’t drunk.”

Record Store Days of yore

Jim


Chris Osborne’s “Robert Johnson and the Blue Terraplane,” inspired by his classic “Terraplane Blues”

It’s Record Store Day.

A couple months after I came to New York from Madison Wisconsin in 1982 I got a job at the long defunct record trade magazine Cash Box, as retail editor. Not that I knew shit about record retail, though I did spend much of my time in high school and after at record stores.

Had they been pool halls, of course, it would have been a sign of a misspent youth, as my old man used to say. But I’d done that back in junior high, sweeping the carpets of cigarette butts and cleaning transparent scoring sheets at the Hilldale Bowl in order to gain free time at the pool tables–not that I got any good.

My record store time, though, did me well when it came to the record business, not so much in preparing me for the Cash Box gig but in gaining a knowledge of musicians, songwriters and producers, all gleaned from the back cover of long-play albums, or LPs, as they were called—later to be referred to as “black vinyl albums” after cassettes and then compact discs replaced them as the leading physical music product configuration.

There were three Madison record stores I hung out at. During junior high it was Victor’s Music in the Hilldale Shopping Center, where they had listening booths for you to sample records before purchase—not uncommon in those days. I think they also had the weekly Top Singles list from Madison’s Top 40 AM station WISM (always spoken as a word to rhyme with “jism”) there, too, but those might have been stacked a few stores down at Woolworth’s, where they definitely had the weekly chart lists from Chicago’s powerhouse Top 40 station WLS.

I vividly remember going down to Victor’s the day of Beatles’ and Rolling Stones’ new releases, especially the latter’s two-sided 1967 single “Ruby Tuesday”/”Let’s Spend the Night Together” the day after they did it on Ed Sullivan. But whenever I went downtown to the University of Wisconsin campus I’d hang out at either Discount Records or Lake Street Station.

Discount Records, on State Street very near the university, especially stands out in my fading memory because my friend Chris Osborne worked the counter. I think she was already in New York by the time I got here, and in the ’90s she managed the Jazz & Blues department at the Tower Records Lincoln Center outlet. I don’t know if I knew in Madison that Chris was also a painter—not to mention as rabid an Ashford & Simpson fan as I was. But I took her with me to see A&S at least once at Westbury, and I know she painted a fab portrait of Nick and Val, I think alongside a classic car, as she frequently combines music legends and legendary cars in her portraits (among her awards is the Classic Car Club of America 2003 Fine Art Award of Excellence).

Lake Street Station used to be near Discount, at State and Lake, if I remember right, during the Vietnam War demonstration days, then moved a few blocks down from Discount on State Street. It was at the first location where I spent hours reading album jackets, and at the second one, after I’d begun writing for The Madcity Music Sheet, where what remains the coolest bit of merchandising by a record store that I can remember took place.

It was the release day of Elvis Costello’s second album This Year’s Model, and Elvis was a major mission for me and the Sheet. Indeed, we put out our first and only special issue in advance of his second Madcity tour stop—at the Orpheum Theater, a few more blocks down State Street near the State Capitol, with Nick Lowe and Mink DeVille, in 1978. Again, if memory serves well, Lake Street Station was mid-block, and from the corners at both ends were cut-outs of Elvis’s famous pigeon-toed portrait from the cover of first album My Aim is True, taped to the sidewalk and interspersed with red arrows pointing the way inside the store.

Funny, but as I write this, I’m looking at the Star Power On CBS Records and Tapes nail-clipping kit that the label’s college rep gave us at the press party promoting This Year’s Model‘s release along with the new albums from Eddie Money and Billy Joel. I’ll never forget telling her how excited I was that they included Elvis, though like I said, we were huge backers at the Sheet. “But a new Billy Joel album is an event,” the CBS gal said—my cue to leave.

By the way, I love Lake Street Dive, but I always have to look up their name since I’m always stuck at Lake Street Station.

Anyway, I got to New York and got the retail editor job at Cash Box and learned that Discount Records was owned by the biggest music retail chain Musicland, and was sent to cover the conventions of the next biggest chains, Record Bar and Camelot Music—each 100-plus strong at the time (Musicland had over 400). Record Bar was great because it was essentially run by hippies and based in Durham, N.C., which was beautiful and near Chapel Hill. Based in North Canton, Ohio, Camelot’s conventions were marked by major label-supplied entertainment each night: I remember seeing John Waite there, with a rhythm section of ex-Patti Smith/Iggy Pop bassist Ivan Kral and the late Frankie LaRocka, whom I had met in Madison when he was with David Johansen and who later became a dear friend, on drums; in fact, Frankie, when he was an A&R guy at Epic (where he signed Spin Doctors), let me write the liner notes to the great The David Johansen Group Live CD release of 1993 (it had been a promo-only LP when it was first released in 1978, when Frankie was in David’s band).

But Roy Clark’s show one year at Camelot was truly unforgettable. He had a terrible cold and could only croak out his songs, but it didn’t stop him from performing and having a great time—and giving his audience a show to cherish. And I still have my trophy for being on the golf team that finished second in the 1983 Maxell Camelot Tourney.

After beginning a 20-plus year stint at Billboard in the mid-’80s, I was sent one year to cover the convention for New England’s 81-store Strawberries Records & Tapes chain, which was owned by the notorious mob associate Morris Levy. But “Moishe,” who also owned Roulette Records (hit artists included Tommy James, Lou Christie and Joey Dee and the Starliters) and had owned the famed jazz club Birdland (his older brother and partner was stabbed to death there in 1959), had been charged in a highly publicized organized crime extortion case (all of this documented in the best-selling music business book expose Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business) and wasn’t at the convention.

Moishe, by the way, was convicted, but died before he could go to prison. I never met him, but I did interview him on the phone once during the trial. And I knew his son Adam, who used to hang out at Cash Box. His dad named another label after him–Adamm VIII Limited, which released an unauthorized version of John Lennon’s Rock ‘n’ Roll album (theirs was titled Roots) after Levy had sued Lennon for copyright infringement over lyrics to “Come Together” that Lennon had lifted from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me,” Levy having owned the song’s publishing.

But back to the Strawberries convention. Not only did the most extraordinary Maria McKee perform there, but so did a girl group, the Bristols, that featured three gals who worked at the chain. I figured they’d be okay at best, but they were downright terrific—and understandably major players in Boston’s late ’80s rock scene.

As for New York’s record stores, Sam Goody’s was still big when I got here. I’ll never forget when Tower Records opened its first store in New York—its Greenwich Village flagship superstore at 4th and Broadway. I was hanging out with Ben Karol, who with partner Phil King owned the small but significant King Karol stores. I was drinking heavy and chowing down on vegetarian tamales when Ben, stunned, reverently observed, “Even old man Goody is here.”

Ben Karol was the biggest trip of all for me in record retail. I wouldn’t say he was ornery, but he was usually grumpy. He and Phil had owned a coffee shop at LaGuardia—again, if I remember right—and he was one of many old school record retailers who started out selling records out of the trunks of their cars.

I loved calling Ben regularly when researching retailer surveys, especially when the major labels raised their prices. Every retailer would moan and groan and angrily gripe over how price increases would cripple their business—except Ben. He’d always refuse to criticize the labels thusly: “I don’t know how much they need to break even.”

I used to pop in on Ben now and then on the second floor of his main store on 42nd Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. One time he had a few stacks of CDs on the floor of his office. The labels were just coming out with CDs then, and these were some of the first releases. I remember being highly excited to see them—and greatly entertained by the following story Ben laughed as he related: Many years earlier, a record company salesman had come into the store and asked Ben to play a new single that he guaranteed would be a huge hit. Ben started to play it, and halfway through, stopped it, picked it up off the turntable, opened the door and flung it across the street, turning to the stunned salesman and shouting, “Get the fuck outta my store!”

The record was David Seville’s “Witch Doctor”—the huge 1958 novelty hit that introduced Alvin and the Chipmunks.

There’s another great Ben Karol story, only this one came to me from Dave Nives. Dave was a dear friend who died unexpectedly some years ago. I like to call him “the last of the great record men”—even though Seymour Stein’s still alive—because he had such deep knowledge of vintage rock ‘n’ roll, R&B and country music, and the record companies that put it all out.

Dave was a regional salesman for Rounder Records when I met him. When he died he was A&R at Koch, and desperately wanted to sign the late, greatest polka artist Eddie Blazonczyk after I turned him on to him. “This is real rock ‘n’ roll!” Dave said of Eddie, which was absolutely true. But sharing the fate of so many great ideas in the music business, Dave was overruled from above.

Anyway, Dave was a great joke and story teller, and as he used to service the King Karol stores, he told this great one about Ben—though you’d be right to find it perfectly awful. Turns out that one of Ben’s employees came up to him one day and asked if he could have the day off to attend his father’s funeral. “We all had fathers!” Ben groused.

I used to tell this story often, one time to Holly DeSantis, another dear music friend who had also worked at King Karol. I think I was at one of her parties when George Usher, the great New York singer-songwriter, came over to me and said, “I’m the guy with the father!”

I admit I was embarrassed, but even George somehow found humor in it.

But I enjoyed covering record retail and frequently contributed retail stories to Billboard after moving over there. Two of them, in fact, are among my proudest Billboard contributions.

The first is what I always refer to as “the Snow Cone Story.”

I’d been going to Eunice, Louisiana—”the Cajun prairie capital”—every November to attend Marc and Ann Savoy’s annual boucherie, or Cajun hog kill—admittedly weird in that I’m vegetarian. I’d stay with my dear friends Todd and Debbie Ortego, who owned the Music Machine music/video store in downtown Eunice.

Todd’s the most knowledgeable Cajun/zydeco/swamp pop people there is, and is a party DJ and KBON radio station air personality—though he gave up the store a few years ago. But the first time I went there I was struck, not only by the active pool table in the middle of the store, but by the dormant snow cone machine in the corner. It being November, Todd explained that they only operated the machine during the summer months, when they sold a lot of “New Orleans shaved ice”-style snow cones. I was blown away by this brilliant, unique profit center and when I came back to New York asked Billboard‘s retail editor if I could do a story on it. He said yes, and I did—but he chose not to run it: It didn’t fit the usual record retailer profile, which, of course, was precisely the point.

Swear to God, to this day, it was one of the best stories I ever wrote. I found his rejection totally unacceptable.

For many days and nights thereafter I’d send him—and other Billboard editors–nasty emails and leave brutal voicemails. I think the last one was something along the lines of “Give me the snow cone story…or give me death!” The fact that I’m here to write about this now shows that he finally caved and ran it—and in fact loved it.

But I didn’t have to threaten suicide for him to run my other great record retail story, the one about Lucy’s Record Shop in Nashville. In the ’90s I used to go to Nashville at least three times a year for the big country music industry events (the CMA Awards, Fan Fair and Country Radio Seminar) and would drive past Lucy’s every morning on my way to Music Row from the Downtown YMCA, but I managed for years not to notice it: You see, it was on Church Street, directly opposite a dairy that had a big sign congratulating its employee of the month—to whom I always yelled a hearty congratulations out the window.

Then one day, an early Sunday morning, I was walking around downtown, a Sunday New York Times under my arm. This girl comes over to me and says, “Don’t I know you?” and she actually did. It was Mary Mancini.

I’d known Mary when she was a publicist at Elektra Records in the late ’80s before progressing into A&R—and then disappearing. I liked her very much, but had forgotten about her—and suddenly here she is. She’d been intrigued that anyone in Nashville would have the Sunday Times, as at this time, probably the mid-’90s now, you could only get the Times at a couple places in town.

She caught me up on her story, which began with her move to Nashville at a time when the country music-focused town was trying to expand into rock and pop. She wanted to find another label gig, until an out-of-town DJ friend complained that there was no place there to buy vinyl and suggested that she open a record store.

So she opened Lucy’s in 1992, naming it after her Weimaraner—who was almost as big an attraction as her alternative rock record stock. But Lucy’s was more than a record store, as Mary promoted a veritable community center where young people could gather and talk politics and social issues. And then she experienced a personal transformation as she herself became politicized after learning about the struggles experienced by the alienated young Nashville rockers, many of whom were dealing with gender bias and abuse.

Lucy’s did in fact become an all-ages punk rock venue/community center in addition to being a record store, but after six years Mary wanted to settle down with her husband (the acclaimed alternative-country band Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner) and live a more normal life. So she closed it and took a full-time office manager job at Nashville’s first Internet services provider—and became ever more politicized, thanks to the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, involving herself in the latter with voter registration (which she’d promoted heavily at Lucy’s).

Mary co-hosted a progressive talk radio show for Vanderbilt University station WRVU-FM for the next six years, and became more active in local and state politics. She eventually took on the job of executive director of Tennessee Citizen Action, a public interest/consumer rights watchdog group. Then three years later, when the state senator in her district retired, she decided to run for office, and while she lost in the 2014 Democratic primary, she was elected the following year as Chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party.

On July 26, 2016, I watched as Mary Mancini, now one of my heroes, read Tennessee’s delegate tally at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. I know I wept openly.

Congratulations, Billy Gilman!

Jim

No one is happier than me that Billy Gilman did so well on The Voice, finishing second last night.

I was there, at Billboard, for Billy’s first album, One Voice, released in 2000 when he was 12, and got to know him, his mother, and his manager at the time—not to mention Asleep at the Wheel’s Ray Benson, who had discovered him at age nine. The album’s titletrack hit the Top 40, and with it he also became the youngest artist to have a Top 40 country single.

Back then Ray was confident that Billy had what it took to stay successful after his voice changed, and last night proved him right. Meanwhile, Billy courageously came out as gay two years ago, hours after fellow country artist Ty Herndon came out.

But Billy always had a pop sensibility, as evidenced by his performance in 2000 of “Dream a Dream” with then 14-year-old Welsh soprano Charlotte Church, and most significantly, his 2003 album Music Through Heartsongs—Songs Based on the Poems of Mattie J.T. Stepanek.

Recorded when he was 14, Heartsongs already showed a deepened voice and a more mature album content due, remarkably, to the “heartsong” lyrics of Mattie Stepanek—the then 13-year-old best-selling poet whose books stemmed from the incurable form of muscular dystrophy that would take his life just before his 14th birthday—and the stylistically varied music by top Nashville songwriters including Richard Leigh, Tom Douglas, Bruce Roberts, Randle Chowning, James Slater, and the album’s (and One Voice‘s) producer David Malloy.

Billy and Mattie had met on Larry King Live.

“He started to read his poems, and I looked over at my father and mother choking up—and it wasn’t like my father,” Billy told me upon the 2009 publication of Messenger: The Legacy Of Mattie J.T. Stepanek And Heartsongs by his mother Jeni Stepanek.

“The kid was really touching someone who wasn’t touched a lot. But they didn’t sound like ordinary poems, but like lyrics. I wondered if there was any way I could do one on a record—as a bonus cut or something—and I called everybody in Nashville who were involved with my career at that point and pitched the idea, and it ended up being the whole record.”

Billy later learned that Mattie had rejected numerous other like offers.

“Other artists couldn’t get the message of his heartsongs,” he explained. “I’m so honored they chose me, because he was one of the greatest people anyone could ever meet.”

Heartsongs‘ standout track was “I Am/Shades of Life,” which combined two of Mattie’s heartsongs.

“David Malloy wrote the melody and I thought, ‘Man! That’s not a song but an anthem!’ I still get letters about it! But it was really long so they cut the words in half for radio. Mattie and I both felt they needed to keep the whole thing because otherwise the story was lost, so the song was re-cut. It was kind of like ‘One Voice,’ and the video was awesome.”

Billy was 21 when I last spoke with him in 2009, and had just begun writing his own songs.

“I had to go home and wait for my voice to change—which gives you an awesome out for anything!” he said. “You can say, ‘Thank you, I’m done,’ and then go on to the next thing. But at the end of the day I’m a country singer, and I never had the opportunity as a kid to do what I wanted to do with my sound—and now I can.”

I believe Billy remains a celebrity ambassador for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, having served as co-host of the Jerry Lewis Telethon. As for “I Am/Shades of Life,” it remains a favorite song of mine, with a melody and vocal I find very moving, along with, of course, Mattie Stepanek’s poetry and spoken words.

What I say about ‘Danny (Fields) Says’

Jim

danny2

I’m very happy that Danny Says, a documentary on the life and times of Danny Fields that’s been in production for the last couple years, is finally coming out via Magnolia Pictures on Sept. 30. Based on attending an early screening, I can say it’s very good.

But it’s also missing my four hours of interviews-two of me, two of Seymour Stein that I did, though at least Seymour does get a few onscreen seconds. As the director has the tapes, I don’t know what I said verbatim. But I did say a few important things about Danny that no one else said-neither Seymour nor the stellar likes of Iggy Pop, Judy Collins, Jonathan Richman and Alice Cooper–so I’ll try to recapture them here the best I can.

I definitely recall my main point about Danny Fields, since it’s one I often use when I speak about him–which is often–and that is, there’s no telling what music of the last 50 years–from the mid-1960s on to this day–would be like without him. I mean, this guy had a hand in nearly every key music development post-Beatles–and even had a hand in The Beatles, too.

Indeed, Danny “is an expert arbiter of culture–music being his main focus,” Timothy Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, told me a couple years ago when I wrote about the library’s acquisition of truckloads of Danny’s papers–along with his vast collection of interviews and photographs, audio and video tapes, films and memorabilia.

“But we have to keep in mind that he has been writing all of his life. His articles for 16 Magazine deserve a close reading for how they promoted and shaped youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s. His several books detailing the lives of his friends–Linda McCartney, [Andy Warhol’s Bad star] Cyrinda Foxe–were the result of an amazing amount of research. His role in creating, promoting, and managing the public personas of The Ramones–one of the most influential rock groups of the 20th century–is a case study in how music culture operates.”

Yes, Danny discovered and managed The Ramones, for which he remains best-known to most people, probably. But long before that the Phi Beta Kappa Harvard law school dropout was deeply embedded in Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory scene in New York (he wrote the liner notes for the Velvet Underground’s Live At Max’s Kansas City and lived with Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick) prior to becoming publicity director at Elektra Records, where he worked with acts like The Doors, Nico and Judy Collins and managed The Stooges and MC5. He also worked with artists including Cream, Lou Reed and Rufus Wainwright, and if you ever get the chance to stroll through his West Village apartment hallway you’ll see a wall lined with his photos of a young Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Divine and many of the aforementioned.

And as Young noted, Danny played a not insignificant role in Beatles history—aside from being a close friend of Linda McCartney. He’s the one who published John Lennon’s infamous “We’re more popular than Jesus” quote (in the August, 1966 issue of Datebook).

Danny Says, of course, takes its name from the Ramones song on the band’s landmark Phil Spector-produced End of the Century album. But Danny is a true Renaissance man, with interests far beyond pop music.

“It’s odd to go from Shakespeare folios and 18th Century prayer books to posters of Dee Dee Ramone!” he told me, and now I’ll tell you what I’m sure I said in my interview: Danny can go from Shakespeare folios and 18th Century prayer books to posters of Dee Dee Ramone–and just about anything cultural, historical and intellectual you can think of. He and I actually go to the opera together, which is great for me on two counts: Not only do I get to spend quality time with him, but he actually knows opera and can explain to me what we’re seeing.

Of course, my close friendship with Danny Fields isn’t based on opera, but even though I wrote the first book on The Ramones (Ramones—An American Band) and thanked him in it and interviewed him at length, it isn’t based on The Ramones or punk rock, either—though I obviously knew his name from both.

No, when I first met Danny Fields—and I was so thrilled to meet him, knowing full well who he was—it was in, of all places, Nashville. To be precise, it was at a Warner Bros. Records party at some country club during what was then called CMA Week, in reference to the week of performing rights society banquets and other celebrations culminating with the Country Music Association Awards. Must have been 1984, because I was full-time at Cash Box magazine as retail editor, in New York only a year or two and hadn’t managed to break in as a freelancer anywhere—until that fateful night.

Two things stand out, over 30 years later. First, Conway Twitty was there! Second, so was Danny Fields! But what on earth was Danny doing at a country music event in Nashville?

What I didn’t know was that Danny, who was no longer managing The Ramones, was now editing a country music magazine called Country Rhythms—having famously edited 16 Magazine–and was starting up a magazine to capitalize on the new MTV craze, Rock Video. I was an avid MTV viewer at the time, but was ambivalent about the quality of rock videos–though extremely opinionated. So when Danny said he was starting up a magazine called Rock Video, I practically begged him to let me write for it, specifically, review rock videos.

He asked how I got to the party and I told him I drove there in a rental car. He said if I gave him a ride back to his hotel—and got him back safely—I could write for him and Rock Video.

Thank you, Avis.

I’m pretty sure I was the first writer to review rock videos. And Danny let me contribute to Country Rhythms, too, country music being, ironically, what brought us together in the first place.

So not only do I not know what popular music would be like without Danny Fields, I don’t know what my career writing about it would be like. And I’m absolutely sure I’m not the only writer who would say that, let alone musician, let alone Yale library curator.

“He teaches me something every time we meet,” said Young, “and I’m glad to have his papers here at Beinecke with those of Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, Robert Giard, Richard Neville, Ezra Pound and other talents who reshaped the way we see, read, and hear the world.”

The Dixie Chicks, Muhammad Ali and Donald Trump

Jim

I’m happy to be in L.A. today, but I’d love to be in Nashville tonight when the Dixie Chicks return to the sold-out Bridgestone Arena 13 years after they were unceremoniously–or maybe in fact with great ceremony–blacklisted by country radio following Natalie Maines’ impromptu and instantly infamous comment of March 10,2002.

On that day–as recounted in today’s Tennessean–the DixChix, then one of the biggest acts in the country, period, watched news coverage of the buildup to war with Iraq while preparing to perform a concert in London. Their then current hit “Travelin’ Soldier,” about a young Vietnam soldier who didn’t make it back, was the top entry on the country radio airplay charts, and they didn’t want to have to play with a war on the horizon that they didn’t support.

Maines acknowledged this in introducing the song: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all,” she told the London crowd. “We do not want this war, this violence,” she said, then sealed the group’s fate: “And we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.”

In short order “Travelin’ Soldier” was pulled from radio and disappeared from the charts. Stations quit playing the Chicks entirely, some inciting ex-fan gatherings where their records were destroyed. They never had another country radio hit.

“The real tragedy is all the great music we will never hear because their momentum was stopped,” Beverly Keel, chair of the recording industry department at Middle Tennessee State University, said in The Tennesean . “It was the perfect storm of the time and the place and what she said.”

Indeed, the only thing I can liken it to was Muhammad Ali’s historic refusal to be inducted into the Army in 1967, costing him the best three and a-half years of his life as an athlete, not to mention all the money he would have made during them–not to mention cementing his status then in much of the country as a hated, ungrateful traitor. The difference, of course, is that Ali knew going in what it would likely cost him, whereas Maines spoke spontaneously and probably didn’t know what hit her–though it didn’t affect her, either. She and bandmates Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire never once attempted to “walk back” her comments, to use the now popular way of denoting a politician’s softening of a comment that proves intolerably damaging.

Even now during their sold-out 55-city tour they’ve been performing before a large picture of Donald Trump as Satan.

“I get banned for not liking Bush and now Trump can practically put a hit out on Hillary and he’s still all over country radio!” Maines tweeted last week. “Hypocrites!”

Within days of the Chicks’ banishment I was approached by a radio station to discuss the situation, clearly with the understanding that I would follow what we now call “the narrative,” that being that the Chicks were finished. The war had begun, and in the early goings, seemed to be going great from the Texas president’s perspective.

But I refused to go with the script.

I had two points: One, that it was way too early to predict the Chicks’ future based on a war that only started. “Who knows what it will be like in a month or two?” I said, maybe not in those exact words, but that was the gist.

Two, I noted that whether or not they ever again received any country radio support, the Dixie Chicks had already amassed an immense fan base, who likely would not turn en masse against them, and could conceivably continue to buy their records–depending, of course, on quality. Sure enough, their last studio album, Taking the Long Way (2006), sold well over double-platinum and won Grammy Awards including Album of the Year, and for its unapologetic single “Not Ready to Make Nice,” Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

“Nashville loved these women, Nashville signed these women, and Nashville made these women stars,” author and country music historian Robert K. Oermann told The Tennessean. “It was a shameful chapter that we allowed to happen, and you couldn’t blame the Chicks if they did feel betrayed.”

But you can sure stand up and cheer them tonight at the Bridgestone for returning to Nashville in triumph, outspoken political stances intact.

Concert Highlights–The John Jorgenson Quintet at the Cutting Room, 7/26/2016

Jim

Jorg
(Photo: Terri Horak)

“Touring musicians lead super glamorous lives,” declared John Jorgenson at the start of his John Jorgenson Quintet gypsy jazz gig July 26 at the Cutting Room.

Except, that is, for this particular night: Flying from L.A. to Hartford, Jorgenson had to land in Abilene in order for his plane to refuel, since its Dallas destination was too busy. So he was forced to spend the night in the airport waiting for a new connection, and while he made it to the Cutting Room on time, his guitar—and luggage—didn’t.

“I borrowed a guitar from Jason [his violinist Jason Anick], a shirt from Simon [upright bassist Simon Planting],” Jorgenson told the Cutting Room crowd. “Everybody contributed—except the pants I’m wearing are mine, because none of the others’ fit!”

Glamor aside—and despite the challenge of playing such intricate acoustic music as his quintet’s on an unfamiliar guitar—Jorgenson, whose latest release Divertuoso is a three-disc box showing his many musical facets, dazzled in his gypsy jazz mode. “Black Swan,” from the new set’s Returning disc featuring the quintet, was particularly noteworthy in its adaptation by Jorgenson from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, specifically, the entrance of the “naughty” Black Swan.

“My grandparents gave me the Fantasia soundtrack as a child, and I loved Tchaikovsky ever since,” Jorgenson explained. He also gave background on the gypsy jazz genre, citing guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli as “the patron saints of this style of music.”

“They were inspired by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Benny Goodman, and played on acoustic instruments, which wasn’t being done in jazz at that time,” said Jorgenson, who demonstrated Reinhardt’s two-finger technique—he used only his index and middle fingers of his left hand after his third and fourth fingers were paralyzed after being burned in a fire—and closed with Reinhardt’s gypsy jazz standard “Nuages.”

He also lauded his band, besides Anick (also a mandolinist and one of the youngest instructors at Boston’s Berklee College of Music) and Planting (“one of the great bass players in gypsy jazz”), including drummer Rick Reed (“incredible stamina on brushes”) and rhythm guitarist Max O’Rourke, whom he singled out for having “the hardest job, because he’s always active and doesn’t get to rest.”

Jorgenson, incidentally, also played bouzouki—though he declares it a banjo for airport security. He said he would have played clarinet, but it was packed in a suitcase.

As for the other two Divertuoso discs, From the Crow’s Nest features J2B2—The John Jorgenson Bluegrass Band featuring Jorgenson on mandolin and guitar and vocals, Herb Pedersen on banjo and guitar and vocals, guitarist/vocalist Jon Randall and upright bassist Mark Fain. Jorgenson, of course, was a central player in country music’s great Desert Rose Band, along with Pedersen and Chris Hillman.

The third disc, Gifts From the Flood, consists of instrumentals played on prized instruments damaged during Nashville’s historic 2010 flooding, that have been painstakingly restored.

Jorg1
(Photo: Terri Horak)

Concert Highlights–Lyle Lovett and His Large Band, 8/9/15

Jim

Someone nudged me on the shoulder a couple Sundays ago in the middle of Lyle Lovett’s show at Lincoln Center Out of Doors to point out the obvious: With 14 pieces in His Large Band, it costs a lot of money to put them on the road.

And these weren’t ordinary pieces, not by a long shot. To identify the ones I know: the legendary Russ Kunkel on drums, Matt Rollings on piano, Keith Sewell on guitar and mandolin, John Hagen on cello, Viktor Krauss on bass, Luke Bulla on fiddle, vocalist extraordinaire Francine Reed. Players with credits like these cost money, and that’s not even counting their suits, dry cleaning bills, and three tour buses.

And the way Lyle treats his musicians speaks plenty about what kind of guy he is. Not only did he introduce everyone at Lincoln Center, he related where everyone was from, how long they’d been with him (some since 1978!), and what they do when they’re not with him.

“It’s nice to get together with your close friends and your family, no matter what the occasion is,” he said, then, leading into his wonderful “Since the Last Time” take on funerals, added, “Sometimes even a solemn occasion can be joyful.” So many of his musicians had made their own records or played on so many major recordings, he noted, that “the world wouldn’t be the same without them.”

So he let each band member mention his outside work and gave many of them solo spots, most notably Reed, who actually began the show singing her great version of the Ida Cox blues classic “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues” from the middle of the audience before joining Lovett on stage on “What Do You Do.” Bulla was beautiful on “The Temperance Reel,” and Sewell likewise shined brightly on one of his songs. Lovett also brought out Willie Nelson’s longtime harmonica player Mickey Raphael to help out on a tune: “I travel around, so my friends cannot escape me,” Lovett said. “But when you see your old friends you realize that life just can’t get any better—which is a sobering thought when you realize they aren’t going to get any better!”

But the respect Lovett shows for his band extends into space and suffuses his entire fan base. Looking out into the August Lincoln Center evening crowd, he expressed delight that there was still plenty of sunlight for him to see how well-dressed everyone was—when it was clearly shorts and t-shirts.

He also expressed how he’s grateful every day that his folks gave him the opportunity to pursue music, and were so supportive of a pursuit that has since led him to the White House, where he has participated in the Country Music and The Gospel Tradition installments of the PBS series In Performance at the White House. He delved easily into both genres at Lincoln Center, centering on his own unique niche of country swing that’s more big band jazz than traditional Texas or Western swing.

But being Texan really underlies Lovett’s work: “I talk so much about my home state,” he said, “and I got to see so much of it on weekend road trips through the windshield, where you get an up close look at the world that you don’t get sitting in the back.”

He ended with one of my favorite songs of his, “That’s Right (You’re Not from Texas),” a sweet appraisal of obvious outsiders who are nevertheless welcomed warmly. He was even sweeter himself afterward, bringing out his own photographer to take his pictures with everyone at the meet-and-greet. Mine showed me in shorts and the same worn-out golf shirt I seem to wear whenever my picture’s taken, that and a fraying army web belt with the end looking like it’s dangling out of my open fly—which it wasn’t, I hastily add.

So much for how well-dressed we all were.

Here’s “That’s Right (You’re Not From Texas)”:

Tales of Bessman: Fan Fair, Country Music, and Loudilla Johnson

Jim

Less than a month away from the 2014 CMA Music Festival, and I’m prompted, by the passing of Loudilla Johnson, to think back to when it was called Fan Fair and held at the dirty, dusty, magical Tennessee State Fairgrounds, for those of us who love country music and cover it, the best days of our lives.

It was a lot smaller, then, but still big, and each of the main Fairgrounds buildings was packed with country stars of every rank, from A-List to F, in their custom-designed  booths signing autographs and selling trinkets. I still have, somewhere, a little makeup mirror with a plastic case emblazoned with “For a Fan of Tammy Wynette,” though as much as I love him, I think I got rid of my glow-in-the-dark Confederate Flag Hank Williams, Jr. gym shorts even before returning to New York.

“Wear those at the gym when you get home!” bellowed Merle Kilgore, Hank’’s manager (not to mention writer of such classic country songs as “Wolverton Mountain,” and with June Carter, “Ring of Fire”), who thrust a pair into my hands—and those of my pal Bob Merlis. We both loved Merle dearly, but neither of us had the chutzpah to bring them home.

Fan Fair left the Fairgrounds for Downtown Nashville in 2001 and gave up the name in 2004. Dear Merle’s long gone—even if I can still hear him laughing loudly at us–and now so is Loudilla Johnson, 75, who with her late sister Loretta and surviving sister Kay, co-founded the International Fan Club Organization, or IFCO.

If one thing symbolized Fan Fair, and maybe by extension country music iself, it would likely be IFCO. It was the Johnson’s offshoot of the Loretta Lynn Fan Club, which they started in 1963 after Loretta Johnson, living at the family ranch in Wild Horse, Colo., began corresponding with Loretta Lynn.

Much of this last sentence, by the way, was lifted near verbatim from Peter Cooper’s obituary in The Tennessean. He’s such a good writer I couldn’t improve on it and didn’t bother trying.

“Them girls was my first official fans, the ones who started my fan club and stuck with me for years,” Lynn wrote in her memoir—and Cooper quoted. “Shoot, we started the whole week’s long event called Fan Fair together, even though none of us got the credit for it.”

Also quoted in Cooper’s piece, author/historian (and host of Fan Fair’s star-studded IFCO shows) Robert K. Oermann said, “The other stars saw how successful they were with Loretta’s club. Buck Owens’ sister, Dorothy, came to the girls and said, ‘You ought to form a fan club organization, because the other clubs could learn from you.’”

This was in 1965, when the Johnson Sisters formed IFCO. It consisted of 75 fan clubs working together in uniting country stars and their fans.

Four years before the first Fan Fair in 1972, IFCO staged its first multi-artist concert, during Nashville’s annual DJ Convention (long since known as Country Radio Seminar).

“The Johnsons were supporting the fans long before there was a Fan Fair,” Oermann told Cooper. “And from the beginning of what became the CMA Music Festival, they were intimately involved. Loretta, the sister who died in 2009, was sort of the spark plug that started the whole thing, but it was Loudilla who was the most business-minded of the three sisters. All three of them were zany and fun. They were devoted to country music. They were nothing but love.”

Nothing but love.

IFCO eventually worked with over 375 fan club groups, and showcased everyone from legends like Johnny Cash and Charley Pride to such stars of today as Jason Aldean and Lady Antebellum.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to Fan Fair, er, CMA Music Festival. I don’t know if that fabled bond between country music star and fan still exists, and if it does, to the degree it did that year, 1996, when Garth Brooks came unannounced to Fan Fair and stayed 23 hours and 10 minutes straight, signing autographs without taking a break. Or when fans from all over the world lined up at the booth of Australia’s LeGarde Twins—also know as Australia’s Yodeling Stockmen–as happy  to pose for pictures with them as with Trisha Yearwood in her fantastic recording studio booth, where her fans could actually sing along with her and come out with a tape recording of it.

But if the love affair between country stars and fans continues, give thanks to the Johnsons, who formalized it. Not for nothing were they presented with the Ernest Tubb Humanitarian Award at the 2002 R.O.P.E. (Reunion of Professional Entertainers) banquet, in that their IFCO Show concert proceeds always went to charities: The original E.T. would flip his guitar over at the end of his performances to show the word “thanks” in big block capitals on the back.

Unlike so many classic country songs, for Loudilla, Loretta and Kay Johnson, who were so devoted to country music, their love was indeed requited.

A performance by Lynn Anderson at a special 2009 CMA Music Festival show in memory of IFCO co-founder Loretta Johnson:

Concert Highlights–Del McCoury Band with David Grisman at City Winery, 4/17/14

Jim

Del McCoury said early on that he didn’t want to repeat any of the songs from the previous night’s first of two shows at City Winery. According to Del McCoury Band bassist Alan Bartram, he didn’t.

Alan, incidentally, also mentioned during the show how thrilled he was to see it spotlighted in New York magazine. Turns out he’s a longtime subscriber.

Speaking of magazines, the band had been to Relix earlier in the day, and had already done “a lot of picking,” said Ronnie McCoury. Del noted, too, that he’d spent a lot of time at the Winery “downstairs with the barrels.” He seemed happier about that visit than the one at Relix.

The first half of the show was all McCoury Band. They did their version of Dylan’s “Walk Out In the Rain,” actually from the 1995 album Ronnie & Rob McCoury. It’s as good a Dylan cover as there is, and Ronnie sounds a lot like Del singing it.

Del prefaced the performance of his 2008 album titletrack Moneyland by noting that John Herald’s manager had sent it to him shortly after Herald died (an apparent suicide in 2005).

Herald was one of the major players in New York City’s bluegrass scene, having formed the Greenbriar Boys in 1959. I was lucky to meet him when he was a key part of  Greg Garing’s Alphabet City Opry in the late ‘90s in the East Village.

 

Another highlight came with another McCoury album titletrack—last year’s “The Streets of Baltimore” cover of Bobby Bare’s classic 1966 country hit. As Del explained, he had lived in Maryland for a time, when he was playing with late bluegrass upright bass great Jack Cooke.

Determining after that no one in the audience was from Baltimore, Del opened it up to requests: “You paid to get in here, I didn’t,” he said. “We should do something you want to hear.” It was “High on a Mountain,” his 1972 album titletrack, and then he brought out David Grisman.

Grisman related how he met Del at Del’s first show with Bill Monroe (he played five-string banjo) in the spring of 1963 at NYU, where Grisman was a student. He and Del then sang the Monroe Brothers’ “Nine Pound Hammer,” Grisman on mandolin and Del on guitar. From their Del & Dawg album of ‘90s jams, they performed “Country Boy Rock & Roll.” Marty Stuart also does a great job of the Reno and Smiley country classic:

Also from Del & Dawg came “The Tennessee Waltz,” “Walkin’ the Dawg” and the Carter Family’s “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes.”

Grisman scored by pointing out how late-night TV never mentions the Carter Family, and that “any financial advisor will tell you to put some of your money in CDs.” He was also the most visual guy on stage, a big, gentle bear of a man in gray shirt and slacks to match his long hair and beard, positioned in between Ronnie in a black suit and Del in a light one.

He would turn to his left to share vocals with Del, then turn to his right to trade mandolin licks with Ronnie, rocking physically while Ronnie stood and smiled—a striking balance in appearance and performing style.

Del and Dawg will now tour together, while Rob completes his first solo CD.