Tom Graves' Blog

The Buckley-Vidal Debates

2009-04-11T07:27:00.000-07:00

Thought you blog readers might want to check out the article about yours truly and the Buckley-Vidal debates that just ran in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Click on the link below and check it out:

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2009/apr/11/the-great-debates/

Poor Tom's Almanac

2009-04-10T21:15:00.000-07:00

Poor Tom's Almanac

Proverbs, Sayings, Precepts and Quotations

No. 1

Never stand behind a woman in line at a donut shop, especially if she is wearing business attire. They are always buying for a large group and can never make up their mind about what they want. Choices, choices, choices.

Sympathy for the Devil - A Kind Word for Albert Goldman

2009-03-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

Albert Harry Goldman is inarguably the most controversial music biographer of the last generation. His biographies of first Elvis, then John Lennon, have been spit on by the best and worst critics on both sides of the Atlantic. “Bio-porn” Gore Vidal called his writing. And when Goldman veered off into wild sensationalism, as when he referred to Elvis’ uncircumcised penis as a “hillbilly pecker,” who could argue?

Yet, I have a confession to make. I like the work of Albert Goldman, rotting carcasses and all, and I liked the man himself. To be philosophical about the Elvis book, I believe his scabrous take on the man was necessary, an antidote to the agitprop nonsense written about the man his whole career, and upon long reflection I feel it is a proper bookend to the balanced portrait presented in the definitive, and far politer, biographies by Peter Guralnick.

Goldman, to me, is the Yin to Guralnick’s Yang, and when Guralnick was too gentlemanly to go down the ratholes of Elvis’ final skid, Goldman relished the opportunity and came up with a morality tale and an American nightmare. I have been privileged to personally know three Elvis biographers, not to mention a score of other writers who have contributed masterfully to the Elvis canon. But no one explored the dark side of Elvis better than Albert Goldman.

My friend Dave Marsh, one of those three Elvis biographers, unsurprisingly detested Albert Goldman and in an interview with me suggested that if he met Goldman in a dark alley he would feel obligated to throttle the bastard. He also stated emphatically that Goldman not only had a welter of inaccuracies in the book (more on that in a minute) but that the book was full of outright lies. This accusation confuses the issue with Goldman’s John Lennon bio which to me and others seemed calculated to create controversy by deliberately placed distortions (or outright lies). The most notorious of those about Lennon was Goldman’s assertion that Lennon trolled exclusive sex parlors in New York City for boys. To my knowledge no one has ever found one shred of evidence to back up that preposterous claim. So why would Goldman say it? Answer: to sell books. My take on it is that Goldman felt so bloodied and beaten down by the hostility towards his Elvis book, which Goldman felt was truthful and accurate, that he had nothing to lose by exaggerating a few things in the Lennon book. He knew coming out of the gate that he would be reviled no matter what he wrote.

I was in my mid-twenties when Goldman’s Elvis came out. Being a Memphian, you can’t imagine the reaction to the book in Elvis’ hometown. Of course the fans went completely apeshit; none of them wanted their idol besmirched, particularly by some smirking, sneering New York Jew (Goldman was right when he said much of the reaction against him was rooted in anti-Semitism) who hated Elvis and everything about the South. I was a part of the Memphis youth who had more or less rebelled against the Elvis faction when the Beatles stormed America. Elvis was old and déclassé, a greaser who still slicked his hair back with hair cream at a time when the rest of us kids were fighting our dads to let our hair touch our ears. Elvis and his Las Vegas lounge act were hopelessly out of date to many of us who were hip to Rolling Stone magazine, and when Elvis went off the grid to visit Richard Nixon in the White House we shut the door on him.

Goldman’s book confirmed all those rumors that had circulated about Elvis for years. If you lived in Memphis you couldn’t help but hear what was going on. He had become the Howard Hughes of the rock generation. One evening at a local café I bumped into a friend who was the brother of a local lawyer. This friend had a copy of Goldman’s Elvis in his hand. We started discussing the book. He told me that his brother was one of Priscilla Presley’s attorneys and that it was he who had discovered that Col. Tom Parker was born in the Netherlands under another name. This lawyer had passed the information on to Goldman. I told this friend that I had noted about a dozen or so factual errors in the book, primarily small things about people and places in Memphis.

This chance comment set in motion a chain reaction of events that led me to the man himself, Albert Goldman. Goldman was preparing revisions for the paperback edition of the book and wanted to weed out every mistake he could from the first printing. He asked me to go back through the book and note everything I could. I did and subsequently 14 minor changes were made to the manuscript. He also asked me to do some library work for him and verify a movie Elvis would have seen at a particular movie theater on a particular date. That was easy enough.

Goldman struck me as very funny (he had tried his hand as a standup comic, and failed) and obsessed with getting his book right. He was also very helpful in giving a budding writer some advice and encouragement and even sent an article of mine around to a few editors he knew, which is something no writer has done for me before or since. I told him I would be in New York within a few weeks and he invited me to his apartment that overlooked Central Park. I took him up on the invitation and spent a very pleasant afternoon with him discussing all kinds of things, but particularly the Elvis book.

I remember the conversation well. One thing I very nearly argued with him about was his insistence that Sam Phillips in private said, “If I could find a white boy who could sing like a nigger I could make a million dollars.” His argument ran that ALL Memphians used the n-word universally, that changing the word was revisionist and political posturing. Undoubtedly the months Goldman had spent in Memphis convinced him of this because he was absolutely right that a majority of Memphians in the 1950’s spoke just that way. What I feel he didn’t get was how different Sam Phillips was from the Memphis norm. Phillips was weird by any definition and the fact he recorded black music at all set him far apart from day-to-day Memphis racism. Sam Phillips was exactly the kind of man who would refrain from racial invective.

I also remember that Goldman had the crappiest home stereo I’ve ever seen in an otherwise wealthy man’s apartment. It was a beat up Pioneer system and, I swear, he had masking tape wrapped around one speaker to keep the grill cloth attached. When I asked him jokingly about it he replied blithely that he had an expensive European sound system “in the back.” Needless to say, I got no tour of “in the back.”

Goldman tired of me in later years; the young writer (me) wore out his welcome. I read the Lennon book and shook my head. I heard he was working on a biography of Jim Morrison. Then I heard that he had become a member of a very exclusive mile-high club: He died of a heart attack en route to London.

I still read Goldman from time to time. At times his writing was brilliant, as in his acclaimed biography of Lenny Bruce that few dispute was a major work. At other times his writing was little more than hysterical piffle, a very bad imitation of Tom Wolfe and the other New Journalists. He was a champion of disco when others, like me, were dismissive and he wrote eloquently on the subject. He wrote a strange but insightful book about marijuana (he wrote a lot for High Times magazine and apparently enjoyed the effects of cannabis) and I’ll never forget a story he told about smoking some hashish so potent that he believed he couldn’t swallow. He went to the emergency room in a state of panic and was greatly embarrassed when the doctors laughed and assured him he would, in fact, get better.

He reported wrongly that Albert King was B.B. King’s brother, a lie Albert told for years to unsuspecting journalists to bring himself closer to B.B.’s brighter flame. In that same piece he brilliantly evoked a head-cutting contest between B.B. and Albert and in another article brought the drum contest between rivals Elvin Jones and Ginger Baker to vivid life. Lastly, he wrote a savage piece for Life magazine comparing a Rolling Stones concert to the Nuremburg rallies. Robert Christgau later reported that as he and Goldman passed a joint between them one night, Goldman laughed and admitted that he never even attended the concert.

That’s probably true. But I still liked him.

Pink Floyd Revisited

2009-03-17T13:41:00.001-07:00

Pink Floyd: The Division Bell; Syd Barrett: Crazy Diamond

Tom Graves, Rolling Stone, 16 June 1994

IS THIS still really Pink Floyd? That seems to be the question, as it has been since Roger Waters left the band in 1985 to dip deeper into the sci-fi soup. Waters has since missed no opportunity to slag his former bandmates as incompetent fakes. He would suggest that he was Pink Floyd, although judging from his overwrought, concept-burdened solo albums, that notion should be put to rest.

The debate on the current Floyd centers on the band's use of hired guns, songwriting professionals brought in to shore up a sound that otherwise might not be Pink Floyd enough. What makes this criticism superfluous is that much of the great music of rock and roll has been written, or augmented, by outside talents. For every Lennon-McCartney or Prince, there have been 10 examples like Leiber and Stoller, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Holland-Dozier-Holland or Phil Spector. It should concern no one too much that in the absence of Roger Waters, who has been Pink Floyd's chief songwriter, the band sought outside help.

What is of concern is whether the music of the post-Waters Pink Floyd stands up to the band's best work – The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, and Meddle. Unfortunately, A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) and the live Delicate Sound of Thunder (1988) were only sporadically successful at achieving the stunning aural power of Pink Floyd's previous work. Their new album, The Division Bell, ironically enough, seems to cry out for someone with an overriding zeal and passion – in short, a nettlesome, overbearing visionary like Roger Waters.

The Division Bell is a quieter, more atmospheric and contemplative Pink Floyd, with lyrics so opaque and inert one cannot hope to plumb their meaning. Of course, no Pink Floyd album would be complete without a concept, and The Division Bell seems to be about that old standby, failure to communicate. Even through the vagueness of the lyrics, one gets the feeling the band is firing broadsides at Waters . On 'Lost for Words', for example, David Gilmour sings: "So I open my door to my enemies/And I ask could we wipe the slate clean/But they tell me to please go fuck myself/You know you just can't win." And so the war continues.

The album also gives off the uncomfortable whiff of middle-age and graying sensibilities. Gilmour, who has become Pink Floyd's de facto leader, in particular seems bored or dispirited. His guitar solos were once the band's centerpieces, as articulate, melodic and well-defined as any in rock. No longer. He now has settled into rambling, indistinct asides that are as forgettable as they used to be indelible. Only on 'What Do You Want From Me' does Gilmour sound like he cares.
Another problem with the album is its length. At more than an hour, it is too long and quickly exhausts its few fresh ideas. The band seems to be padding at every opportunity. Consequently, The Division Bell will satisfy only the most ravenous Pink Floyd fans.

Standing almost in mockery of the swipes the band members have taken at one another is the new three-disc box set Crazy Diamond, which collects the decidedly eccentric post-Floyd musings of original member, Syd Barrett. Barrett, as all Floyd devotees know, was booted from the band in 1968 during the making of A Saucerful of Secrets as he deteriorated mentally from excessive intake of LSD. In 1969 and 1970, he was encouraged by Gilmour and Waters, among others, to return to the studio. The erratic results were released over a period of time as The Madcap Laughs, Barrett and Opel.
Barrett has become the focus of a ghoulish cult that apparently relishes the disintegration palpable on the tracks included on Crazy Diamond. The fact is, Barrett was of dubious talent from the get-go, although his singles with Pink Floyd, 'Arnold Layne' and 'See Emily Play', broke the band onto the British charts. Out of Barrett's entire 70-or-so song oeuvre, only a handful of tracks – all done with Pink Floyd – are standouts.

Crazy Diamond (the title was taken from Pink Floyd's outstanding tribute to Barret, 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond') painfully document's Barrett's disappearance into the lysergic mist. At best, the songs collected hold a morbid fascination; at worst, they are little more than whimsical ditherings. Barrett collectors are completists by nature, and this set adds more than a dozen bonus tracks, some of which are hilariously off-kilter. The booklet offers no insight or update on Barrett's condition.

The album Barrett is by far the most focused and spirited of the three discs, but only a fellow acid jockey or hale adventurer could possibly sit through all 58 tracks. Perhaps expectations for the set would be more realistic if it were retitled, something along the line of, say, Crazy Zirconium.

© Tom Graves, 1994

Working Out the Kinks

2009-03-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

Dear Blog Members:

I am working out the kinks in this blog thing as quickly as I can while I am on spring break this week. Man, it is complicated! The problem is that you tell your blog site one set of things, then you have to tell the Google Groups thing another set of things. The two don't always jive although at this stage you'd think they would find a way to make things easier for the casual blogger, me.

At this point you should not receive anything other than my posts -- none of the subsequent emails from anyone replying.

By the way, I'd love your comments and replies. Here's how to do it. You can just send me an email reply, which will come ONLY to my attention. If I click a magic button I can share your comments with the others, or not. Also you can comment directly onto the comment box at the bottom of each blog post. There is a weird glitch with this -- you need to click on the INDIVIDUAL post (which are all listed on the right hand of the page) to pull up the comment box sometimes. I have noticed when all the posts are strung together often the comment box ain't there for reasons I am not smart enough to figure out.

Enough tech talk. On with the good stuff.

The Mythmaking of Jack Kerouac

2009-03-16T22:30:00.000-07:00

Review of The Jack Kerouac Collection from Rhino Records
From Rock & Roll Disc, September, 1990

Written by Tom Graves

Including the albums:

Jack Kerouac: Blues and Haikus (With Al Cohn and Zoot Sims)

Poetry for the Beat Generation (With Steve Allen)

Readings By Jack Kerouac On the Beat Generation

Truman Capote very nearly sank Jack Kerouac’s literary reputation with five well-chosen words that exploded like cigarette loads in the public eye. “That’s not writing, that’s typing,” he argued on David Susskind’s television show. He was referring to Kerouac’s well-publicized spontaneous prose writing style about which the beat writer claimed that “the first thought is the best thought.”

This philosophy, of course, flew in the face of conventional wisdom about the art of writing, which mandated writing analytically, consciously composing phrases and sentences with heavy revision and editing, and crafting an essay or short story or novel in the same meticulous, calculating way an artist constructs an intricate mosaic. Kerouac, however, believed in that adrenaline (or amphetamine in his case) rush of creative zip that connected the writer to some mystical Zen-like inner eye that could see more clearly and poetically than the conscious mind.

Which was a load of hooey and horseshit from a writer too lazy and undisciplined to put in the extra work to perfect his writing.

Let’s explode a few more of the myths about Jack Kerouac. The biggest and most oft-repeated is the one about On the Road, irrefutably his greatest work, being published straight off a huge roll of teletype paper. The manuscript, the legend goes, was knocked off in only a couple of weeks as he worked nearly non-stop, cranked-up on bennies, refusing even to stop and insert periods and commas.

Have the myth-mongers actually read On the Road? Did those periods and commas in my copies appear there magically? Of course not. Kerouac put them in and he carefully revised and reworked the book from cover to cover. Nothing about On the Road was spontaneous in its final draft. It was as thoughtfully scrutinized and pored-over and whittled down as Capote’s In Cold Blood. Viking editor Malcolm Cowley was instrumental in helping Kerouac whip the manuscript into a comprehensible, flowing narrative: It was this fortuitous collaboration with a caring yet forceful editor that resulted in one of the great literary achievements of a generation.

The other myth is that Kerouac continued to publish great books and poems. After the publication of On the Road in 1957, Kerouac’s creative well ran bone dry. Overnight he became the biggest fool on the literary scene, a person so bloated and obnoxious and bent on destroying himself with cheap drink that he was roundly avoided by all save his closest friends – such as Allen Ginsberg, a saint of a man, who stood by Kerouac at all times, even when he savaged Ginsberg in print and verbally assaulted him with anti-Semitic tirades. Kerouac’s other praiseworthy books such as The Dharma Bums (which does contain several engaging chapters) and The Subterraneans (which I consider practically worthless) were all written prior to the publication of On the Road. His later years of dissipation and decline saw the publication of such horrific embarrassments as Pic, Vanity of Duluoz, and Satori In Paris – books that could be bettered by many a reasonably gifted creative writing student.

I was turned onto Jack Kerouac by a fellow journalism major in college, and I quickly fell under the spell of Kerouac’s careening, tire-squealing prose and with his romantic, nostalgic tales of picking up a rucksack, sticking out your thumb, and America-here-I-come. But the more I read (and I read them all), the more I became convinced that spontaneous writing for all levels of literary endeavor (with the possible exception of poetry) was counterproductive and flawed in theory. Kerouac himself, in his later novels, could be brilliant for two pages or two paragraphs then run short of creative breath, coasting on childlike gibberish for page after page, chapter after chapter. Books like Visions of Gerard and Tristessa were painful to get through, redeemed only by momentary splashes of incandescent prose that faded as fast as a photographer’s bulb.

I hit upon an idea that to me made sense: Why not, I reasoned, collect some of those brilliant moments from Kerouac’s less-esteemed works into an anthology, a reader for those who want to go exploring beyond On the Road? I contacted Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, biographer Ann Charters, and others about the project and was given their blessings with the warning that the Sterling Lord Agency, which controlled Kerouac’s estate and writings at the time, would be impossible to deal with. They were. (Note to readers: A few years after our initial contact, Kerouac biographer Ann Charters purloined my idea for a Jack Kerouac reader and navigated the treacherous copyright waters of Sterling Lord et al. until the reader saw print. There was no thank you in the book or mention of yours truly, the originator of the idea. And yes, I’m still pissed.)

Shortly before his death, Kerouac married Stella Sampas, a childhood acquaintance, a woman who apparently understood little of what her husband was all about. Pictures of this matronly woman are shocking, especially after seeing the beautiful photos of his other wives and lovers. Stella Sampas looked like the Church Lady on steroids, and after Jack died in 1969 the Kerouac estate, in part due to her negligence or ignorance, virtually ground to a halt.

Only recently have some of his out of print books returned to the shelves, and his recordings for Verve and Hanover, all out of print since the early ‘60s, have just been reissued by Rhino Records’ World Beat label in the most lavish, ornate CD box set yet.

The box itself is covered in a handsome linen-type parchment with sparse, elegant graphics, as is the 32-page booklet inside. The book includes several interesting essays from notables such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Michael McClure and a lengthy discourse (not all of which is factually accurate) from a David Perry, who is not a name familiar to me. The most haunting set of Kerouac photos I’ve ever seen are collected in this booklet and Rhino should be rightly proud of The Jack Kerouac Collection as a masterpiece of intelligent, instructive packaging. There simply isn’t another box set that can touch it in terms of sheer beauty.

But what of the CDs? They are a mixed bag and unless you are a Jack Kerouac fanatic there are bound to be disappointing moments. The most experimental piece in the set is the Blues and Haikus disc featuring jazz stalwarts Zoot Sims and Al Cohn on tenor saxophones, and in some ways it’s the biggest failure. It begins with Kerouac reading short lines of poetry that he calls “American” haikus – he was too undisciplined to write poetry that conformed to the strict 17 syllables of the traditional Japanese haiku – which are followed by improvised, free-form sax blurts from Cohn and Sims.

Kerouac loved jazz and wrote movingly about it all his life. Few writers have captured in prose the mad spirit of be-bop and Charlie Parker with the eloquence of Jack Kerouac. He wanted to blow jazz poetry, for his prose to function musically like jazz where “s” sounds and “o” sounds and “z” sounds became as important as notes on a scale. In theory this sounds engrossing, even revolutionary, especially to a music critic. But in practice it becomes increasingly harder as the words flow to grasp whatever thread of meaning the words hold. Since there is no story being told, no narrative, only random “first thoughts” zooming wildly out of your speakers, one quickly loses interest and the intense concentration required to follow the selections falters. Upon repeated listenings, in spite of Kerouac’s expressive voice (except on the awful portions where he sings), I began to wonder just who the hell would listen and relisten to these discs?

Blues and Haikus contains a lot of curious studio chatter, which confirms my suspicions that Kerouac was drunk during the sessions. He giggles and goofs like an errant schoolboy until the stern producer, Bob Thiele, barks orders at him. The liner notes tell us that Cohn and Sims split to a nearby bar as soon as the session was completed, leaving a devastated Kerouac crying alone in a corner in the studio because they hadn’t bothered to listen to the playback.

Better are the readings on Poetry for the Beat Generation, with Steve Allen backing him on “jazz” piano that sounds remarkably like the elemental flourishes one hears on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The disc starts with “October In the Railroad Earth,” one of Kerouac’s most evocative pieces. Also of interest are the poems “Charlie Parker,” “Bowery Blues,” and “Goofing At the Table.” The bonus track is taken from Steve Allen’s television show, where Kerouac read from On the Road and Visions of Cody. It is interesting to note that Steve Allen respected Kerouac’s art enough to let him play it straight; he didn’t make him dress idiotically in tails and sing to a basset hound as he did Elvis. It’s yet another instance of high-brow jazzoids snobbing rock and roll.

Readings By Jack Kerouac On the Beat Generation showcases Kerouac in a more sterile setting without instrumental backing, yet his voice is engaging enough to go it alone. But again, one soon tires of this – a story one can follow, but scattershot prose is next to impossible to digest for more than a few minutes at a time. To hear firsthand what I mean, locate a recording of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” sometime and see if you’re not captivated from beginning to end, in spite of Truman’s babytalk voice. Capote knew that writing is storytelling, communicating something to someone. With Kerouac, self-expression was the all-important concern, which to me is a narcissistic view of the creative process.

The most unintentionally memorable track on the Readings disc is the bonus cut, a lecture Kerouac gave at Brandeis University in 1958 on the question “Is There A Beat Generation?” The crowd is unruly and unsympathetic and Kerouac is obviously dead drunk; his thick-tongued speech gets more embarrassing with each passing minute. Already the King of the Beats was well on his way to becoming America’s most celebrated literary barfly.

Rock & Roll Disc readers may well wonder why a spoken word box set was chosen for review in a rock music-oriented publication. Kerouac was and remains an enormous influence on several of rock’s pivotal artists, especially Bob Dylan who fused beat poetry sensibilities with Woody Guthrie’s grassroots politics to become the spokesman and conscience of a new generation. One could also cite Jack Kerouac as one of many influences on John Lennon (compare Kerouac’s poetry with “Come Together” or “I Am the Walrus”). Even more important is that Kerouac opened up the world of working class America for inspiration and celebration and creative sustenance – all of which would become cornerstones of rock and roll imagery. Kerouac could write passionately about hitchhiking on a hot day, meeting a friend in a train station, sleeping in a forest, breaking your back on a work crew – things the great artists of rock and roll took to heart and conveyed in song.

The beat generation stood for freedom above all things – freedom from conformity, restrictive sexual attitudes, blind patriotism, religious intolerance, freedom from all constraints. Rock and roll remains a social thorn because it still dares to cast off those same shackles.

The Jack Kerouac Collection is the loveliest CD set I’ve seen, and it contains some important, rare material. But if you haven’t read On the Road, spend your money instead on a good paperback edition. There you will find the same America, the real America, of Charley Patton, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Kurt Cobain.

Sleep Easy Jeff Beck

2009-03-16T13:36:00.001-07:00

On top of the indignity of coping with a severed digit (which is coming along quite nicely, thank you very much) I learned last week that my dreams of being one of the great guitar players on Planet Earth have pretty much screeched to a halt. My fret hand, which I had the presence of mind not to stick in the lawn mower like I did with my picking hand, has developed increasing pain in the first joint on my index finger -- the finger and joint I use most to get that vibrato trill B.B. King is justifiably famous for. It took me years to get that trill down-pat and apparently it was that weird twist, shake, note bend, and pressure that made the joint swell up about triple its normal size.

I'll never forget when I complained to my first wife Denise about soreness in that joint. "Show me where it hurts," she said, suspiciously sympathetic. I showed her and she put her fingers on the joint. "Here?" she said as she squeezed hard and laughed. Sparks and lightning bolts shot out from the joint. I did not find it one bit funny. I slept with one eye open after that.

So, after years of trying to just put it out of mind, I finally went to an orthopedic specialist, the son of a surgeon I remembered from my days at Smith + Nephew. This young whippersnapper showed me the x-ray of the finger and pointed to a healthy joint with nice lining, cartilage, and floating space between the bone. Then he directed my attention to the joint in question. "The trainwreck," as he phrased it. I've looked at hundreds of bone x-rays in my career with S & N and I know what a bone-against-bone joint looks like. Well, I got one. Option one is aspirin or Advil; two is prescription stuff; three is a cortisone shot right between the bones; and four is to fuse the joint so it doesn't bend at all.

I'm going for option two.

Like just about all kids my age, I didn't know really what an electric guitar was until the Beatles unleashed them on us Yanks. They were impossibly expensive, loud, and difficult to master but I wanted one anyway. On my 15th birthday I was given a $25.00 acoustic guitar from a discount store called Dixiemart. It was a classical guitar and the strings buzzed. Nontheless, I picked out the rudiments of "Spoonful" and "Sunshine of Your Love" by Cream. In those days of course, Eric Clapton was God and I, like a million other fretbusters, worshipped God religiously.

The sound of an electric guitar when I was a kid always prompted a search for the source -- we would ride our bicycles all over Parkway Village in hopes of hearing it up close and watching the player. I remember being Shanghied by my parents into going as a family to a hymn sing on a Saturday night, a fate worse than Lawrence Welk. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw an older man there with an electric guitar. I watched him all night and never once heard a note come out of his amplifier. Had he been audible at all I'm certain someone would have told him to turn down.

It was much later when I heard about this new music called "blues" and about these incredible guitarists from England. Clapton was probably the best of the lot early on, but fell from the firmament, one of those musicians daunted by his own genius. My two favorites, possibly because they were so obscure to most of my high school peers, were Jeff Beck and Peter Green. Since the early 1960's Jeff Beck has never lost one iota of ability or creativity. He has had weak albums, weak bands, weak songs, and fallow years, but never has his playing been weak. Peter Green who had the best blues tone of any guitar player I ever heard (well, maybe Albert King shared that best-of) succumbed to drugs and madness and is today medicated to the nines and trotted out on stage for a few moments for those who remember.

My brother and I briefly met Jeff Beck backstage in 1972. He was a true gentleman and a role model for any uppity star who can't appreciate fans. I will never forget his kindness.

I wanted to interview Peter Green in the worst way. I wanted to be the guy who brought him back from the dead and tell the world his sad, haunting story. Be careful what you wish for... I managed to get his phone number and called him in England. Within seconds it was painfully clear to me that I was dealing with a very sick, disturbed man -- he wound up hanging up the phone in my ear and I have left him alone to his darknesses ever since. Lesson learned.

I sold six prized guitars to afford my trip to Bintou in Africa. The trophy guitar was my Gibson Les Paul tricked out like Peter Green's to get that tone. Many people told me I sounded "just like" Peter Green. Bless them. I certainly tried.

I recently bought a Les Paul copy made by Agile, my only guitar now. I wanted to customize it again and trick it out to sound just like Peter Green.

Maybe some day.

My 100 Favorite Films

2009-03-16T10:44:00.000-07:00

I had to get in on the action too. There are lists out there everywhere, some good, some great, some awful. The first thing you will notice about my list is that I cheated like crazy here, counting all of Stanley Kubrick's films, for instance, as one entry. Why? To avoid hair-splitting and to create space for a few more oddities.

Do I necessarily consider each and every one of these films on my list the greatest cinematic achievements of all time? Nope. I'm sure one or two of these (or 50) will have some of you scratching your heads. I'm tired of those American Film Institute lists with the same old formula fluff, although I'm a hypocrite myself and include a few tried-and-trues like Red River. (What I should have put is Hatari--at least the bush scenes. That would have puzzled some.) Most of these I would want to be my desert island collection, some are just downright fascinating artistically for quirky reasons (Roman Polanski's Macbeth, for example), and some should be studied by any serious student of the cinema.

Ultimately, Top 100 lists probably say more about the compiler than anything. I've grown increasingly fond of tough, gritty, realistically violent movies. I'm sure that says something about me, but I have no idea what. I still don't own a firearm and have yet to get in a bar fight.

****Note: I'd also like to hear from people on those movies (and filmmakers) you love to hate.

Tom Graves' Top 100 Film List

1. Citizen Kane – Orson Welles
2. The oeuvre of Stanley Kubrick (I’m cheating counting this as one film): 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, Eyes Wide Shut, etc.
3. Persona – Ingmar Bergman
4. Cries and Whispers – Ingmar Bergman
5. Hour of the Wolf – Ingmar Bergman
6. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – Luis Bunuel
7. The Exterminating Angel – Luis Bunuel
8. Pandora’s Box (silent) – G. W. Pabst
9. Red River – Howard Hawks
10. The Searchers – John Ford
11. Goldfinger (the greatest Bond film of them all)
12. A Hard Day’s Night (the Beatles at their most fun)
13. Rear Window – Alfred Hitchcock
14. Psycho – Alfred Hitchcock
15. Peeping Tom – Michael Powell
16. Chinatown – Roman Polanski
17. 8 ½ Federico Fellini
18. Taxi Driver – Martin Scorsese
19. Goodfellas – Martin Scorsese
20. Godfather I and II – Francis Ford Coppola
21. Apocalypse Now – Francis Ford Coppola
22. The Emigrants and The New Land – Jan Troell
23. The Road Warrior
24. Nightmare on Elm Street
25. Assault on Precinct 13
26. The Seven Samurai – Akira Kurosawa
27. M – Fritz Lang
28. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill 1 & 2 – Quentin Tarantino
29. Days of Heaven (runners up: Badlands and The Thin Red Line) all by Terrence Malick
30. The Day the Earth Stood Still
31. Alien
32. The Terminator
33. Blow Up – Michaelangelo Antonioni
34. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance - John Ford
35. The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia – Sam Peckinpah
36. Cockfighter
37. Rolling Thunder (starring my great friend, the actress Linda Haynes)
38. His Girl Friday – Howard Hawks
39. Mutiny on the Bounty
40. Frankenstein/Bride of Frankenstein – James Whale
41. Dracula - Tod Browning’s original version
43. Freaks – Tod Browning
44. The Navigator, the General – Buster Keaton
45. Greed - Erich Von Stroheim
46. Some Like It Hot – Billy Wilder
47. The Last Waltz – Martin Scorsese
48. The Bicycle Thief – Vittorio De Sica
49. Point Blank – John Boorman
50. The Last Tango In Paris – Bernardo Bertolucci
51. Night of the Hunter – Charles Laughton
52. My Life As A Dog
53. Cinema Paradiso
54. Nashville – Robert Altman
55. The Last Picture Show, Targets – Peter Bogdanovich
56. The Producers – Mel Brooks’ original
57. Young Frankenstein – Mel Brooks
58. Double Indemnity
59. Bonnie and Clyde – Arthur Penn
60. Little Big Man – Arthur Penn
61. Lone Star – John Sayles
62. Passion Fish – John Sayles
63. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
64. From Here To Eternity
65. Smiles of a Summer Night Ingmar Bergman
66. Amarcord – Federico Fellini
67. Jules and Jim – Francois Truffaut
68. The 400 Blows – Francois Truffaut
69. Breathless – Jean-Luc Godard
70. The 7 Beauties, Love and Anarchy, The Seduction of Mimi Lina Wertmuller
71. Wages of Fear and its remake, Sorcerer – Henri Clouzot and William Friedkin
72. Blue Angel
73. Ground Hog Day
74. Cool Hand Luke
75. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Milos Forman
76. Loves of a Blonde, Fireman’s Ball – Milos Forman
77. Lola Montes Max Ophuls (for the exquisite, fluid camera work)
78. Leon (the Professional) – Luc Besson
79. Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago – David Lean
80. The Commitments – Alan Parker
81. Macbeth – Roman Polanski
82. The Thin Man
83. Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Man Who Would Be King – John Huston
84. Grand Illusion —Jean Renoir
85. Olympia —Leni Riefenstahl
86. Laurel and Hardy The Music Box
87. The Black Stallion – Carroll Ballard
88. The Wizard of Oz
89. Women In Love – Ken Russell
90. It’s A Gift-W.C. Fields
91. Breaker Morant
92. Midnight Cowboy
93. Hard Boiled/The Killers —John Woo
94. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (original version) – Don Siegel
95. The French Connection – William Friedkin
96. Metropolis-Fritz Lang
97. Lonesome Dove (made for TV movie)
98. Knife in the Water-Roman Polanski
99. Rosemary’s Baby-Roman Polanski
100.The Sopranos (TV series)

a couple of new ones to throw in the DVD player:

-George Washington (a little known gem)
-Spellbound (documentary on National Spelling Bee)
-Fog of War (fascinating film on Robert McNamara)
-the remake of Dawn of the Dead
-28 Days
-The Cooler
-Croupier
-The Triplets of Belleville (especially the black and white intro)
-Persepolis
-American Splendor
-Crumb
-Capote
-Shattered Glass (about New Republic writer/faker Stephen Glass-- has some terrific low key performances and a story surprisingly gripping)
-Sexy Beast (Ben Kingsley delivers a better performance here than Gandhi)
-Lock, Stock, and Three Smoking Barrels
-Hard Eight

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Alternative 100 Best American Films

Rosenbaum is about as quirky a critic as has been ever taken seriously. I violently disagree with many of his choice picks and think some of them strange enough to qualify him for a straitjacket. But such is the bloodsport of film criticism. There are films he lists that not only have I never seen, but that I have never heard of. That alone is enough to make me want to take up arms against him. That said, I find his quirks fascinating in a rainy day when I am bored sort of way. His list certainly gets the blood flowing faster than the Novocaine list put out by the AFI (American Film Institue), which follows Rosenbaum's list.

ROSENBAUM'S ALTERNATE 100

Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival (1951)
An Affair to Remember (1957)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Avanti! (1972)
The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
The Big Sky (1952)
Bigger Than Life (1956)
The Black Cat (1934)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Broken Blossoms (1919)
Cat People (1942)
Christmas in July (1940)
Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)
The Crowd (1928)
Dead Man (1995)
***Oh please! Arty tripe by Jim Jarmusch who at least gave us the interesting Mystery Train.
Do the Right Thing (1989)
***My belief is that 50 years from now this silly agitprop from Spike Lee will get unintended laughs in the same way people now watch Reefer Madness.
The Docks of New York (1928)
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974)
11 x 14 (1976)
Eraserhead (1978)
***Time for the straitjacket!

Foolish Wives (1922)
Force of Evil (1948)
Freaks (1932)
The General (1927)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
Gilda (1946)
The Great Garrick (1937)
Greed (1925)
Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1933)
The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
Housekeeping (1987)
The Hustler (1961)
Intolerance (1916)
Johnny Guitar (1954)
Judge Priest (1934)
Killer of Sheep (1978)
***Saw it finally. Boring film school artiness disguised as truth-telling.
The Killing (1956)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
***No, not John Cassavetes. I'd rather watch a film by that great Japanese auteur Yoko Ono.
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
The Ladies' Man (1961)
The Lady From Shanghai (1948)
Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977)
Laughter (1930)
Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)
Lonesome (1929)
Love Me Tonight (1932)
Love Streams (1984)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
***I have never understood the following this inferior Welles film has. Nowhere close to the artistry of Citizen Kane.
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Man's Castle (1933)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Mikey and Nicky (1976)
Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
My Son John (1952)
The Naked Spur (1953)
Nanook of the North (1922)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
The Nutty Professor (1963)
The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Panic in the Streets (1950)
Park Row (1952)
The Phenix City Story (1955)
Point Blank (1967)
Real Life (1979)
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971)
Rio Bravo (1959)
Scarface (1932)
The Scarlet Empress (1934)
Scarlet Street (1945)
Scenes From Under Childhood (1970)
The Scenic Route (1978)
The Seventh Victim (1943)
Shadows (1960)
Sherlock Jr. (1924)
The Shooting (1967)
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
The Sound of Fury/Try and Get Me! (1950)
Stars in My Crown (1950)
The Steel Helmet (1951)
Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
Sunrise (1927)
Sylvia Scarlett (1935)
The Tarnished Angels (1958)
That's Entertainment! III (1994)
This Land Is Mine (1943)
Thunderbolt (1929)
To Sleep With Anger (1990)
Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969)
Track of the Cat (1954)
Trouble in Paradise (1932)
Vinyl (1965)
Wanda (1971)
While the City Sleeps (1956)
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)
Woodstock (1970)
The Wrong Man (1957)
Zabriskie Point (1970)
***No, this guy needs two straitjackets.

Copyright © 1998 Chicago Reader Inc.

The American Film Institute's By-the-Numbers Top 100 List

1 Citizen Kane (1941)
2 Casablanca (1942)
3 The Godfather (1972)
4 Gone With the Wind (1939)
5 Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
6 The Wizard of Oz (1939)
7 The Graduate (1967)
8 On the Waterfront (1954)
9 Schindler's List (1993)
10 Singin' in the Rain (1952)
11 It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
12 Sunset Boulevard (1950)
13 The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
14 Some Like It Hot (1959)
15 Star Wars (1977)
16 All About Eve (1950)
17 The African Queen (1951)
18 Psycho (1960)
19 Chinatown (1974)
20 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
21 The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
22 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
23 The Maltese Falcon (1941)
24 Raging Bull (1980)
25 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
26 Dr. Strangelove (1964)
27 Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
28 Apocalypse Now (1979)
29 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
30 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
31 Annie Hall (1977)
***Am I the only one who thinks this movie is terribly dated now?
32 The Godfather, Part II (1974)
33 High Noon (1952)
34 To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
35 It Happened One Night (1934)
36 Midnight Cowboy (1969)
37 The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
38 Double Indemnity (1944)
39 Doctor Zhivago (1965)
40 North by Northwest (1959)
41 West Side Story (1961)
42 Rear Window (1954)
43 King Kong (1933)
44 The Birth of a Nation (1915)
45 A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
46 A Clockwork Orange (1971)
47 Taxi Driver (1976)
48 Jaws (1975)
49 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
50 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
***Pleasant enough entertainment but no desert island winner for me. And "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" is enough to dump this one in the wastebasket forever anyway.
51 The Philadelphia Story (1940)
52 From Here to Eternity (1953)
53 Amadeus (1984)
54 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
55 The Sound of Music (1965)
***Pauline Kael was right about this one. The truth got her sacked from Redbook magazine.
56 M*A*S*H (1970)
57 The Third Man (1949)
58 Fantasia (1940)
59 Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
60 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
61 Vertigo (1958)
62 Tootsie (1982)
***Dustin Hoffman in drag is deserving of the pantheon?
63 Stagecoach (1939)
64 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
65 The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
***Fava beans and chianti aren't that good.
66 Network (1976)
67 The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
68 An American in Paris (1951)
69 Shane (1953)
70 The French Connection (1971)
71 Forrest Gump (1994)
***This list is like a box of choc-o-lates.
72 Ben-Hur (1959)
***According to Gore Vidal Masala was hot for Judah Ben-Hur. That factoid might make the chariot race more interesting next time around.
73 Wuthering Heights (1939)
74 The Gold Rush (1925)
75 Dances With Wolves (1990)
***Ta-tonka. Tey in the winnnnnn. The things I learn from movies.
76 City Lights (1931)
77 American Graffiti (1973)
78 Rocky (1976)
79 The Deer Hunter (1978)
80 The Wild Bunch (1969)
81 Modern Times (1936)
82 Giant (1956)
83 Platoon (1986)
84 Fargo (1996)
85 Duck Soup (1933)
86 Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
87 Frankenstein (1931)
88 Easy Rider (1969)
89 Patton (1970)
90 The Jazz Singer (1927)
91 My Fair Lady (1964)
92 A Place in the Sun (1951)
93 The Apartment (1960)
94 GoodFellas (1990)
95 Pulp Fiction (1994)
96 The Searchers (1956)
97 Bringing Up Baby (1938)
98 Unforgiven (1992)
99 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
***Is this some sort of Hollywood political correctness afoot here? Otherwise how can anyone explain such a choice?
100 Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

Now -- On to My List of Bad Films and Bad Film Directors
by Tom Graves

Recent bad movies I have seen:

Elephant -- static claptrap posing as art. Gus van Sant is another overrated filmmaker.

Safe -- boring does not begin to describe the paralysis of this one-dimsensional portrait of a woman who finds her world literally toxic. Todd Haynes is not a bad director, and Velvet Goldmine is even worth watching. But this one inexplicably has a following.

Films and directors I think are waaay overrated

Early Spike Lee (however, I am very fond of Clockers, Malcolm X, The Inside Man, and Miracle at St. Elena (sp.?))
Anything by John Cassavetes (no exceptions)
Solaris -- the original and the remake
Pasolini -- anything, especially Teorema
most of Werner Herzog with the exception of the documentaries by and about him
all of Fassbinder, particularly the Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant
Tree of Wooden Clogs
Philadelphia
Oliver Stone (God! What a hack!)
Brian De Palma with a few exceptions such as Carrie and Blowout
Gus Van Sant
Atom Egoyan
Luchino Visconti
Lars von Trier
Peter Greenaway
In the Heat of the Night and Rod Steiger
Meryl Streep
The Deer Hunter
El Topo
much of Woody Allen
Godfather III
La Dolce Vita
Fellini’s last films
The new Star Wars flicks...boring!
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (snore!)
most films about the Civil War

My Top Ten Movie List for 2008

2009-03-15T21:55:00.000-07:00

Top Ten Movie Lists (and more) by Tom Graves

It’s a sad year indeed (2008) when the best cinema offerings are either cartoons or film versions of comic books over a half-century old. And what has happened to cinema’s great auteurs – the Kubricks, the Bergmans, the Fellinis, or the Terrence Malicks? David Gordon Green, who did encourage some hope with his outstanding debut, George Washington, this year released the lackluster Snow Angels and the talented John Sayles gave us the yawner Honeydripper. My ten best list pretty much parrots the one by John Beifuss, critic for The Commercial Appeal, and most other critics – there wasn’t much to seriously choose from. However, the worst list, which I had to pare down from about 30 titles, illustrates just how bad the year really was. I also add a few of my own categories for the cinephiles out there.

My 10 Best List

1. Persepolis (animated film) – Marjane Sartrapi’s harrowing and eye-opening adolescent’s take on the Iranian Islamic Revolution. However, the graphic novels the film is based on are even better.
2. Slumdog Millionaire – sentimental, but wonderfully entertaining.
3. There Will Be Blood—sure, it’s good, and well-acted, but doesn’t it get a bit preachy? My favorite P.T. Anderson film by far is his debut, Hard Eight.
4. No Country For Old Men – great film all the way up to the unforgivably lame ending that is purposely meant to confound audiences.
5. Iron Man – perfect casting for the lead.
6. Dark Knight – Heath Ledger is an inspiration as the Joker, but that growling voice of the Batman is borderline ridiculous.
7. Wall-E – underneath the cute images is a wicked satire of Earth’s destruction.
8. Mongol – Genghis Khan never looked so good.
9. W. – I never thought I’d give Oliver Stone (or George Bush) a thumb’s up. However, this film manages to give us insight into a character more complex than many may have thought.
10. City of Men – Clive Owen is made for the big screen.

Honorable Mentions

1. Sicko – I wonder how this film may have shaped the nation’s obvious disgust with our health care system.
2. Vantage Point
3. The Visitor
4. Appaloosa
5. Transsiberian
6. RocknRolla – finally Guy Ritchie gets back to what he does best. (Note: I recently viewed this film on Pay Per View again and my enthusiasm has waned.)
7. Quantum of Solace – let’s face it, Daniel Craig has reenergized the Bond franchise like no one since Sean Connery.

Guilty Pleasures

1. Cloverfield
2. The Ruins – evil vines, now that’s cool.
3. Rambo and The Punisher: War Zone – the two bloodiest films of the year. High-budget grindhouse masterpieces.
4. The Hulk – Edward Norton makes a great Bruce Banner.
5. In Bruges – okay thriller
6. The Bank Job – ditto
7. 21 – ditto
8. Tropic Thunder – a hoot.
9. Australia – sprawling, old-fashioned epic that works as an entertainment.

My Worst Cinema Experience of 2008

Sitting through Lakeview Terrace with a crowd rabidly anti-interracial that roared its approval every time the unhinged character played by Samuel L. Jackson committed an atrocity against the interracial couple next door.

Too Precious and Arty

1. The Savages
2. Snow Angels
3. Honeydripper
4. My Blueberry Nights – my wife and I actually watched scenes from this movie being filmed in Downtown Memphis. We were disappointed with the results as were the three other people who saw the movie.

The Worst of the Worst

1. The Spirit – abuses every innovation it rips off from Sin City.
2. Diary of the Dead – come on George Romero, it’s time to close the book.
3. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – admittedly I couldn’t hear a lot of the dialogue because of the mass snoring in the theater.
4. Funny Games – nothing funny about this teeth-grinder.
5. Day the Earth Stood Still – Like, why? They couldn’t even make the robot cool.
6. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 – which is worse, these gawdawful chick flicks that can’t rub two brain cells together or the dreck being churned out for African-American audiences by Tyler Perry (or like the equally atrocious This Christmas) that can’t even find a second brain cell?
7. Brideshead Revisited – ditto.
8. Step Up 2 the Streets – ditto.
9. 27 Dresses – ditto.
10. Fool’s Gold – ditto.

My Take On the Octomom

2009-03-15T21:38:00.000-07:00

MY THOUGHTS: 8 babies is in vitro fertilization run amok

There is nothing reasonable or sane about eight newborns, all with their endless newborn needs, being cared for by one mother.

By Tom Graves
Special to Viewpoint (*note: This editorial appeared on the op-ed page of The Commercial Appeal on Thursday, February 5, 2009 shortly after the first news about the birth of Nadya Suleman's octuplets.)

Writer Gore Vidal, who is unquestionably the wittiest and most whimsical provocateur of his generation, once half-seriously proposed a solution to overpopulation in this country. (It should be remembered that overpopulation was one of the great sources of fright a few decades past. We now have far worse frights over which to fret.)

Vidal said that all women should be provided a government card allowing the birth of two children tax-free. After that, Uncle Sam would place such a heavy tax burden on a third child that few would risk such financially punitive measures. Knowing full well the outcry he was likely to get from such an outrageous idea, Vidal added blithely that our society already has dictated how many spouses we may have at any given time and what sex they must be and only a noisy minority objects to that; why not carry things one step further?

I've laughed and told friends and colleagues about Vidal's "solution" for over 20 years -- that is, until I read the news last week about Nadya Suleman, the baby hoarder. After already having given birth to six children, reportedly without the benefit of a father, Suleman upped the ante to 14 with the birth of octuplets -- conceived, we are told, through the modern convenience of in vitro fertilization.

According to news reports, Suleman's mother Angela Suleman says that all 14 of her daughter's children were produced not through flesh-to-flesh contact, like most of the other 6 billion of us on this planet, but through the sterile facilities of laboratories and clinics by people with impressive degrees and starched white coats. It took 46 physicians and staff to deliver all eight of Nadya Suleman's babies in Bellflower, Calif., on Jan. 26.

After taking all this in and giving it judicious thought, I can think of no good reason why laws should not be passed to remedy such idiocy in the future. Any clouded scientific minds that have supported such an obscene joke on Mother Nature should contemplate their folly while stamping out license plates at the local penitentiary.

Even the grandma in this case has cried "enough!"

"It can't go on any longer," Angela Suleman told The Associated Press. "She's got six children and no husband. I was brought up the traditional way. I firmly believe in marriage. But she didn't want to get married."

Make that 14 children now -- and who knows what the final tally may be?

Like most sensible people, I fully support a woman's right to use the medical advances in reproductive technology to have children when otherwise she cannot. Although I am a bit old-fashioned in thinking that the best environment in which to raise a child is a loving home with two stable, married parents (preferably, one of each gender), those who do not fit into my admittedly narrow view of optimum parentage certainly should retain their reproductive rights. Within reason and sanity, that is.

But there is nothing reasonable or sane about eight newborns, all with their endless newborn needs, being cared for by one mother. I cannot imagine the work involved with caring for twins, much less four times that many babies. And what of the six older children? What quality of life will they have under these extreme circumstances? How can any nurturing or attention be given to one without interruption by 13 (and counting) siblings?

I, for one, cry foul. This simply should not be allowed, no matter how badly neurotic mothers desire yet another baby. There should be logical limits placed on in vitro fertilization, based on the number of offspring a potential mother already has and the family environment, including the mother's ability to provide financial and emotional stability for a new child.

Those with more children than sense should be told no, and the rest of us should feel no guilt in telling them so. And if that doesn't work, maybe Gore Vidal can still offer us a two-fer.

Tom Graves of Memphis teaches English and humanities at LeMoyne-Owen College. He also is the author of the novel "Pullers" and the biography "Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson."

The Commercial Appeal publishes "My Thoughts" columns of up to 750 words. If you'd like to submit a column that tells a personal story or comments on a news topic, e-mail it to columns@commercialappeal.com. Include the writer's name, home address, daytime/evening telephone numbers and a few sentences of biographical information. For more information, call (901) 529-2319.

Why I Hate Schnucks

2009-03-14T22:31:00.000-07:00

One of my most distressing errands is when I am dispatched by the wife to the Schnucks supermarket on Union Avenue. Why is there still some sort of snob appeal going on with this rank, inferior deployer of edible goods? Try at any time to drive into the postage stamp-size parking lot and see if you are not met by someone driving out the wrong way. Go inside and the first thing you will hear is the overly loud talking (and usually complaining) of the employees, none of whom seems to actually be from Memphis, especially those strange, misshapen white ones. Where do they import them from? The Deliverance equivalent of the white trash Yankee north? God forfend if you should ask a question because no telling what type of speech impediment you will get in return.

I have been at Schnucks at just about every hour of the day or night and I have yet to see the aisles cleared of boxes being opened and goods being stocked. Being blocked in is a way of life at Schnucks. This morning I was hemmed in by three different ladies with their baskets all jammed in one intersection, daring anyone to speak to them, and damned if they would move their baskets. I myself, as a form of urban protest, refused to budge. Finally they untangled themselves, no word of apology was spoken, and Tom Graves, the Colossus of Cowden Avenue with black smoke curling above his head, went about his grocering.

The old white ladies are the ones who make me want to relive a Sam Peckinpah slow motion death swath. I have noticed that with old age myopia apparently is a given because old white ladies can never see anything except what they WANT to see. Leggo my Eggos is on their mind -- forget that they are blocking ten other shoppers as they dig through the frozen foods for the package that is most perfect or might have a penny less on the sticker price.

The check out. Why is it that the card machine never has a diagram showing you how to swipe the card? Why is it that women NEVER get out their checkbook until all the groceries are rung up and the line stretches back to the deli? Why is it the gay guys always look so damn happy in that store? Have they found a grocery the rest of us are not aware of -- something in the cucumber family perhaps? (Not that there's anything wrong with it.)

I would go to the Piggly Wiggly but I would have to share the store with every single midtown derelict and welfare cheat, and contend with the stockyard smell and third world look of the place. I take that back. That is insulting to third world markets. Piggly Wiggly, in case no one has noticed, is even more expensive than Schnucks. Forty bucks will buy you a box of Triscuits, a loaf of generic bread, a bucket of gizzards (they have a section all their own), and that's about it.

The next closest store is the Kroger Poplar Plaza, home to all the purse snatchers who have been run out of Hickory Hill. One good thing about Kroger is that there is no way you will not know about each and every bargain. The clientele there is sure to be discussing each and every one as you glide down the aisle. You couldn't miss a word if you had air traffic ear protectors on.

Now, Aldi, there is a supermarket. But it is in Cordova, the sixth circle of hell. The traffic out there is like the Schnucks parking lot on a Jumbotron scale. But my, oh my, what fifty bucks will buy you there.

How To Make An Authentic Cajun Roux

2009-03-14T22:23:00.000-07:00

How To Make An Authentic Cajun Roux (for the Uninitiated)

Note: My good friend and great cook Marty Priola reminded me that the following recipe for the preparation of a roux is specifically for seafood-based dishes. He is sooo right. A chicken gumbo, for instance, instead of using bacon grease would more properly use the fried chicken drippings as the source for a roux. Other dishes often call for lighter rouxs than the one here as well. But this is your good, basic, all-around, all-purpose, authentic, to-the-max, lip-smackin', rib-stickin' Cajun roux.

The key to almost every major Cajun dish is the proper preparation of a roux. A roux is basically a gravy base for whatever the meat or seafood happens to be, whether in a gumbo, a creole sauce, or an etouffe. Beware of those newfangled recipes in the Homes and Kitchens sections of newspapers or magazines. These food nannies are always on a health kick (how many of them do you think Jazzercise?) and they substitute canola oil, peanut oil, and even olive oil for bacon grease, which is far and away the best ingredient for making a roux, I don't care what anybody else tells you. You don't use much grease in a roux to begin with, so why not go for the best taste, texture, and results with the ingredient Cajuns have used for generations?

Keep this in mind when making a roux: it is a slow, tedious process. You cannot go off and leave it for even a minute. A roux that burns even a little bit must be thrown out. So it is best to go slow and do it right the first time. Also, it is wise to use a long-handled whisk or wooden spoon to stir (which you will do almost constantly) the roux while you are making it. Long handles keep your hands farther away from the hot grease, which when combined with the flour will stick to your skin and burn like napalm.

Okay, here's what you need:

A heavy three or four quart pot. A thin pot won't do. You can prepare the roux in a thick sauce pan or cast iron skillet with the idea of pouring it into a bigger pot when finished.
1/3 cup of bacon grease
1/3 cup of flour

Over a medium flame, heat your grease and do not let it get too hot. It does not need to be smoking or boiling. When it starts getting hot, but is not yet at the smoking stage, put in about a tablespoon of the flour and whisk vigorously until it is totally dissolved. When that is dissolved add another tablespoon and repeat. Again, make sure you are stirring constantly. Repeat until all the flour is dissolved and make sure the roux is not browning too fast. If the roux is burned, dark speckles come into it. If that happens, sorry podna but you gotta throw that batch out and start over. Ayyyyy-eeeeee!!!

Okay, you've got the flour dissolved and you are stirring steadily but not crazily, just steady, lazy, daydreaming stirring. If you are doing it right you will notice the roux slowly getting browner and browner. Keep stirring for what seems forever until the color is about as brown as brown (not tan) shoes. When it is a deep, nice, reddish brown take it off the fire and put in all your chopped vegetables as your recipe describes. Yes, when you dump those veggies all in they will make an impressive "sssssss" noise and you will need to stir all over again. Keep in mind that until you put those veggies in, the roux keeps cooking even off the fire. So have those veggies ready to go in when the time is right.

Seasoned pros can heat up grease and throw in the flour without even looking, stir it up, and within a few minutes come out with a picture perfect roux. You can't. This takes years and I do mean years of practice in a hot kitchen. What YOU need to do is put on some comfortable shoes (don't do like me and cook without shoes on -- Cajun napalm really scalds those little piggies and I have dropped a knife a time or two and hopped around bleeding all over the floor. Stop laughing.) get a favorite beverage, and stir, baby, stir. Put on a little zydeco or Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys and learn the Cajun two-step while you are stirring. And, as always folks, laissez les bon temps roulet!!!!!

Bintou's West African Fried Chicken Stew

2009-03-14T22:09:00.000-07:00

1 whole chicken cut into its parts, skin on
3 medium onions chopped fine
2 medium carrots sliced ¼” thick
1 tablespoon of tomato paste
1 16. oz (roughly) size can chopped or diced tomatoes
salt to taste
black pepper to taste
hot sauce (if you want it hotter)
vegetable oil
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 tablespoon garlic salt
1 “Jumbo” brand cube (the SECRET ingredient – these are a specific brand of bouillon cube available at most African/international food markets – the cube is ground into powder with a mortar or spice grinder. Beef “Maggi” brand bouillon cubes are an acceptable substitute.)

In a heavy pot pour one half to one inch of vegetable oil and heat over medium flame. In a large mixing bowl sprinkle vinegar over chicken followed by salt, pepper, half the garlic salt, and half a Jumbo cube. When oil is hot, fry chicken until golden brown (remember – no flour is used for this fried chicken). Drain chicken on paper towels, etc.

In the remaining grease (veggie oil, if you did not burn it) add the onions, carrots, tomatoes, and tomato paste with the remaining Jumbo cube and other seasonings, stir well and cook until completely soft, then add 1 ½ cups of water. Cook until water has almost evaporated, then add the chicken. Allow to simmer until water is completely gone, about 30 minutes, maybe less.

Best over rice, particularly Broken Jasmine Rice, a delicious white rice Africans (and millions of Asians, of course) eat with relish that is found in almost all Asian markets. Believe me, there IS a difference in rice.

Alex Chilton review

2005-07-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

Review by Tom Graves – Rock & Roll Disc, April, 1991

Alex Chilton
19 Years: A Collection of Alex Chilton (Rhino Records)

If any one person is emblematic of the musical malaise of rock’s cutting edge during the 1980’s, it would have to be cult factotum Alex Chilton, who has become such a legendary underground figure that other cult bands like the Replacements write songs of tribute to him. When you consider that Alex Chilton’s career brings new meaning to the word “checkered,” his cultdom becomes even more suspect.
My long-standing complaint against Chilton – and, alas, much of what passes for alternative music – is that instead of turning his attentions to the hard work and elbow grease required of songcraft, he has sought to substitute attitude, pose, and that nebulous “capturing the moment” as a suitable replacement. As writer Tom Wolfe pointed out in his infamous expose of the New York art community, “The Painted Word,” what then becomes most important is not talent, or even the art itself, but in how well one can do the “boho dance” – how well an artist can parlay bohemian chicness into a career.
What I find doubly intriguing is that Alex Chilton’s current crop of fans are almost always ignorant of the Box Tops, where Chilton incontestably did his finest work on great slabs of iconic blue-eyed soul like “The Letter,” “Soul Deep,” and “Cry Like A Baby.” After the Box Tops, Chilton formed Big Star (named after a Memphis grocery chain), which released three critically-hailed but publicly ignored albums. The final Big Star album, Third/Sister Lovers, was produced by the problematic Jim Dickinson, another artist who all too often confuses inspiration with perspiration. Their collaboration resulted in album schizophrenia with tight, fat-shorn pop nuggets like “You Can’t Have Me” nestled to chaotic, meandering bilge like “Kangaroo.”
After Chilton went solo he released one crappy record after another (such as the dreadful Like Flies on Sherbet – p.u.!); he was on his last leg, alcoholic, and washng dishes in New Orleans when he cleaned up his act and made an astonishing comeback. Feudalist Tarts, unlike previous solo efforts, returned Chilton to his Memphis soul roots; his playing and singing were better than they had been in years. For the album, Chilton rounded up some of Memphis’s tightest groove musicians, brought them to the studio after-hours, and recaptured some of his past glory. Feudalist Tarts was one of those rare occurrences – which happens only with the most seasoned and motivated players – where the music finds a solid groove yet feels totally laid back and loose. Chilton followed this with the gritty, bitterly funny “No Sex” EP. For one moment pregnant with possibility Chilton looked like he was finally breaking out of his slump – he was working hard, playing killer guitar (“Lost My Job”), and singing expressively, even though he still couldn’t touch his Box Tops vocals.
Then came High Priest and he was right back to square one; the playing was slouchy, the singing abominable, and the choice of material baffling (why “Volare”?).
If it’s an accurate documentary of a puzzling career you’re after, Rhino’s new Alex Chilton compilation is not only serviceable, but insightful. It will quickly clue you in that abut 90% of Chilton’s output is rotten to the core. And considering the inclusion of Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers’s worst songs, you may even begin to question (as I have for years) the worthiness of that album.
Since on a playability scale this compilation rates about two stars (out of five), if you’re curious about Alex Chilton start with his domestic Box Tops CD, move on to the British import two-fer of Big Star’s #1 Record/Radio City, and if you still can’t get enough seek out Chilton’s Stuff CD on the import New Rose label, which includes the entire Feudalist Tarts and “No Sex” EPs, plus some of his best singles.

Wanda Jackson Review by T.G.

2005-06-26T11:57:00.000-07:00

From Tom Graves – Rock & Roll Disc August, 1990

Wanda Jackson – Rockin’ in the Country

The problem with Wanda Jackson is her conviction, or more precisely her lack of it. She was a died-in-the-wool country weeper until she met up with Elvis Presley on his early tours and he convinced her that the rockabilly road was the one paved in gold. Crass commercialization marks all of Wanda Jackson’s recorded output – she didn’t fart without first checking to see where the breeze would blow it. She admits as much herself to Rich Kienzle in the liner notes to this CD when says, “I was always searchin’ for ‘my’ sound, which I never really got. I did too many different styles of songs.”
Elvis’s phenomenal success had every hillbilly singer who could hiccup jumping on the rock and roll gravy train – to little success I might add. But Wanda Jackson’s helium-and-gravel voice on songs like “Fujiyama Mama” was phony and a farce. One listen to her later country hits such as “Right or Wrong” (her best song) should convince anyone that her heart and soul belonged exclusively to country.
Even the backing on her rockabilly sides is limp and anemic, with the exception of Ralph Mooney’s inspired steel guitar scratchin’ on “Honey Bop” (a dumb play on the “Bunny Hop” craze).
After reading Nick Tosches’s wacky praise for Wanda Jackson several years ago (he called her the greatest “menstruating rocker” who ever lived) I had to check out this rockabilly femme fatale for myself. At first I was completely suckered in by the novelty of this ballsy curvaceous bombshell. It was friend and critic John Floyd who convinced me that Wanda Jackson was essentially a fraud as a rockabilly artist.
While my enjoyment of Wanda Jackson isn’t diminished that much (she is fun to listen to, no question) one can’t argue with the bald truth. Listening to this CD today I think I know how a guy must feel when he discovers his old lady has been faking it. It ain’t ever the same again.

Tom Eviscerates Eric Clapton

2005-05-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

Review by Tom Graves
Appeared in Rock & Roll Disc, Jan. 1992

Eric Clapton
24 Nights

Correction. Eric Clapton was God.
It beggars belief that the tired, limp-dicked, becluttered music we hear on 24 Nights is from the same artist whose very name once was the blues. In that magic time of the mid-60’s, when great guitar players seemed to be turning up on every street corner, Britain’s two other great bluesmen, Peter Green and Mick Taylor, worshipped the ground Eric Clapton riffed on. During his stints with the Yardbirds, John Mayall, Cream, Blind Faith, and Derek and the Dominos, Clapton burned a hole right through even the tritest material making junk like Cream’s “Anyone for Tennis?” required listening. His playing was at its zenith during the Layla period until both heroin and alcohol addictions robbed him of whatever fire was left.
It was Miles Davis who once said what I consider the wisest truth about making meaningful music: “The secret,” he said, “is finding the melody within the melody.” In all of Eric Clapton’s great music he is endlessly redefining the melody. Take the seminal “Crossroads”: Every lead run is like a song-within-a-song. It is beautifully melodic, muscular, and each note tells – there is no superfluous riffing, no antics for show. The lead breaks are so airtight and full of authority that they scarcely sound improvised. To the contrary, every fretted note of “Crossroads” sounds rehearsed to perfection.
But, alas, what do we get on 24 Nights, the highly anticipated culmination of his 1990 and ’91 tours at London’s Albert Hall? Try as he might, there’s not a glimmer left in old warhorses like “Badge” (which, here, has an unbelievably lame vocal), “White Room,” and “Bell Bottom Blues.” In fact he often requires help on vocals from his sidemen, who oblige by stepping in during the requisite hard parts. Eric Clapton has become the Perry Como of the rock world, with glassy-eyed, tepid pop ditties like “Pretending” and “Bad Love” anchoring his sets between aimless blues noodling. Anyone who can remain awake during the endless droning of Disc Two (the pop disc) should get an automatic license to operate heavy machinery.
Even when Clapton seems to suggest he is actually trying, his guitar is so weenie sounding that you wonder if he remembers how a god is supposed to sound.
24 Nights confirms what I’ve felt for about two decades about Ole Slowhand: That he has permanently traded in his blue suede shoes for a pair of brown Hush Puppies.

Tennesse Ernie Ford - An Appreciation

2005-05-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

Article from Tom Graves
Appeared in Rock and Roll Disc March, 1991

Tennessee Ernie Ford – Guilty Pleasures

My mother tells the story of a Bob Hope television special that aired in the 1950’s. The comedian had just made a crack about the new summer swimsuit fashions that were “so skimpy the girls will have two sets of cheeks to powder instead of one,” when the screen suddenly went blank then to an “Experiencing Network Difficulty” super that remained on until the top of the hour.
It was in the climate of these squeaky clean times – when to overhear the F-word in a lady’s presence called for an instant showdown with the offender – that an unlikely character named Tennessee Ernie Ford with an offhand, easygoing brand of Southern humor became one of television’s most beloved personalities and one of Capitol Records’ biggest recording stars. Ernest Jennings Ford, from the mountains of East Tennessee, was singled out early in high school as having the makings of a great singer. His booming baritone was folkish and untrained enough to communicate almost effortlessly with his audience (not an easy thing if you have operatic potential), yet skilled enough to bend a song to his will and deliver a powerhouse performance.
His resonant speaking voice is what originally got him out of the hills of Bristol, Tennessee and into a prominent deejay spot on KXLA outside Los Angeles – the city’s number one country and western station. He became a local celebrity by dint of his quick, natural wit, daily doses of “Ernie-isms,” and by opening the mike and singing along with the records. While doing the latter, he was discovered by talent scouts and given a spot on the Hometown Jamboree show alongside country artists like Merle Travis and steel guitar great Speedy West.
It was here that Ford, who had developed a hillbillyish rube character for the show he called “Tennessee Ernie,” began to delve into pulse-quickening country boogie numbers, which had grown in popularity after the Second World War. With his likeable persona and naturally funny demeanor, Ford was an instant hit and soon found himself with a daily network television show, a Capitol Records contract, and more engagements than he could fill.
Ford’s first singles for Capitol did almost unbelievably well. With his stunning, big voice he took the widely-covered “Mule Train” straight to Number One on the country charts in 1949, followed by huge hits with “The Shot Gun Boogie,” “Tennessee Border,” and “I’ll Never Be Free.” His boogie-woogie numbers, such as “Catfish Boogie,” “Blackberry Boogie,” and “Rock City Boogie” were also enormously popular in England, where Ford was and still is considered one of the great pre-rock and rollers. But Ford’s voice isn’t the only thing to recommend these tracks: Capitol employed some of the most daring session men in the business, such as Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West who could take even a bland number and rocket it into the stratosphere with breakneck guitar fills, great blasts of bass note twang, and Speedy’s incredible “bar crashes” on pedal steel.
But it wasn’t until 1955 that Tennessee Ernie Ford made recording history with an obscure number written and recorded earlier by Merle Travis. The song, “Sixteen Tons,” was initially performed by Ford on his television show, and over 1,200 requests poured in for him to sing it again. No fools, Capitol seized upon those requests and rushed out a single. Upon release the song sold over 400,000 units in 11 days. To date it has sold a minimum of four million copies – and probably much more than that if one could accurately assess the total of sales worldwide.
Even after fifty years “Sixteen Tons” remains one of the most unflinching, crystalline images of the common laborer ever recorded. Its bitter tone against the almost palpable evil of the coal company coupled with the pride expressed in the sheer physical strength required of a coal miner actually caused some in those McCarthy times to brand the song “Communistic.” It is a song that has already become a part of American lore and embedded into the national consciousness. No one was surprised when the Soviet Union took the song to heart when Tennessee Ernie Ford toured there during the ‘70s.
Two recent CDs, ‘Sixteen Tons’ on Bear Family and ‘The Best of Tennessee Ernie Ford’ on Rhino, splendidly document the country boogie and country pop sides of Ol’ Rockin’ Ern, and thankfully leave out of the hymns and sacred music that comprise the bulk of his recorded legacy. After reading Ernie’s autobiography in preparation for this piece, I’m more convinced than ever of the man’s great humor, compassion, and humanitarianism. At heart a humble family man, he said this about his career in 1954:

“I love show business, don’t get me wrong. But I’d retire today, if I could and I’m not kidding. As soon as I made enough money [sic], and it doesn’t have to be a whole potful, I’m going to quit and retire to a farm.”

Speaking for those of us who’ve ever owed our souls to a company store, I wish you, Mr. Ford, a pleasant farm life and many years of pea-pickin’.

-Tom Graves

Africa Out, Surgery In

2005-04-01T07:58:00.000-08:00

For reasons I cannot fathom, I apparently did not make the cut on the National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study African cinema in Dakar, Senegal. Boo-hoo. I would love to know the qualifications of the 15 who WERE selected. Ah, sour grapes.

This changes our hopes and plans for this summer of course, but that is probably just as well. We will be going back to Africa probably within a year if the funds magically appear. This summer I hope to accomplish some writing again. I haven't been exactly prolific lately.

FYI: Wednesday I go in for a major hand surgery operation to fix my whacked off finger tip. The good news is the reattachment has worked, but I still have a sizeable area of open wound that will require not one but two skin grafts. One graft will come from the back of the same middle finger. To replace that skin, another graft from just below the stomach will be used. I am very phobic of anesthesia, so this two hour surgery is NOT something I am looking forward to.

Grading student papers is real fun -- NOT. Keyboarding isn't too swooft (old Memphis word -- ed.) either.

Hey is anybody still going to Trivia these days? Haven't heard from old teammates in a long time.

Bintu now has her green card so she will be looking for other opportunities soon. Any ideas are appreciated. Her driver's license -- well, we have some work to do on that one. If anybody sees her out after midnight peeling rubber in midtown, taking the keys while I'm asleep, well, give me an anonymous tip. : )

Spring has sprung and we hope to do some good cookin' this season. I'll soon be smoking a bunch of fish for Bintu's recipes. I'm pretty much addicted to Vimto, the soft drink popular in England, Africa, and the Middle East.

Last but not least -- are you aware that Russian watches and cameras of super high quality are availabe on Ebay, etc. for ridiculously low prices. I have on order a Russian made Leica copy with reportedly a great lens for $26.00. My friend Kenny convinced me that taking photos with this is a great way to get back into photography. His photos are great.

Watches of Rolex quality with somewhat similar design as well as dress watches in the Cartier vein are to be had sometimes for less than $30 on Ebay. Check them out.

Tom G.

Blade III Anyone?

2005-03-11T07:43:00.000-08:00

Hey everybody:

Guess what, I chopped off the end of my finger last weekend. No kidding. My new wife noticed that our yard wasn't looking quite as spiffy as some of the neighbors' and I was dispatched to get rid of the leaves. I took out the lawn mower, drained the old oil, refilled it, bought fresh gas, put on the mulching attachment, etc. Just as I did last year I overfilled the oil tank causing smoke to spew out of the exhaust. The way you fix this is either drain out some of the oil (a pain in the ass) or allow the engine to burn it off. Shutting the engine off is a no-no because it might not restart.

So with smoke billowing I starting mulching leaves. After awhile the leaves weren't mulching so well and I noticed a build up around the mulching attachment. Not wanting to turn off the engine I reached down to pull out a few leaves. No problem. Just be careful.

I felt a cut across my finger like a kitchen knife and thought, "damn, I don't believe I just nicked myself." When I looked, the end of my middle finger was hanging by a piece of skin. Blood had sprayed across my glasses. Adrenaline pumps pretty quick and I swear a thousand thoughts crossed my mind -- "squeeze your finger so you stop the bleeding" "go to Clay's house (the doctor across the street)" "look both ways before crossing the street" "you are now a member of the crooked salute club like Phil, Tom, and Doug" and "damn I bet this will hurt like a sonuvabitch to get fixed."

Well Doc wasn't home. His wife was having a baby shower which I promptly ruined, but there were trained nurses on duty who compressed the wound, looked for lost finger, and called 9-1-1. It was my first ambulance ride. They did not turn on the siren, dang it. Believe it or not I managed to call Bintu, Mom, Bintu, Mom, and Bintu, Mom before I got to Methodist Central.

They called in a plastic surgeon who told me he would try to reattach the tip. By the way, the blade sliced down at a 45 degree angle from the end of the fingernail down towards the first joint and took some bone with it and a good bit of flesh. The doctor told me they would shoot me up with Lidocaine on either side of the finger and then I wouldn't feel a thing. WRONG! It felt like a Singer Sewing Machine was thrashing the end of my finger. I felt even the thread being pulled through (ouch, ouch OUCH!). It was pretty nasty looking I must say.

We did not know if the finger tip would make it or not, but as of yesterday they think it will. I still will undoubtedly need a skin graft, which may be no picnic, but I'm not complaining. I have been on Vicodin and Darvocet (hello grass, hello air, hello dirt). They say it is a good sign when your finger throbs because it is coming back to life. Well, a lot of life must be going on.

I haven't heard from many of you in a long time. As Pearl Jam sez, "Whoa-uh, yo-oh, I'm still alive." So write me. I get lonesome when Bintu is working.

Best,
Tom G.

Gene Vincent's Last Recordings

2005-01-10T15:13:00.000-08:00

Gene Vincent review -- Rock & Roll Disc December 1987

by Tom Graves

Gene Vincent
Born To Be A Rolling Stone (Topline Records Top CD 506, British import)

To see just how far a former great rock and roller can sink, check out the 12 pieces of aural excrement that comprise Gene Vincent's Born To Be A Rolling Stone. The songs are some of the worst countrybilly wheeze fathomable, and the musicians must have been bolted together at that Nashville plant where they crank out these soundalike robots. Vincent's voice, however, is surprisingly durable here considering the abuse it had been put through by this time. But the disc is ultimately a sad reminder of the youthful, vibrant Gene Vincent who once exuded sheet waves of rockabilly burn and street cool on his Capitol recordings. One of the few irritating realities of the CD medium is being hoodwinked into buying inferior recordings by great artists while their classic sides languish in storage vaults -- as is the case currently with the great Gene Vincent.

Tom Graves

Review of Sam & Dave's Greatest Hits

2005-01-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

Review of The Best of Sam and Dave

written by Tom Graves

During the height of the Blues Brothers craze, I went to a small club to see the re-formed Sam and Dave. The dance floor was undulating with yuppies and your average club flotsam, who talked through nearly all the songs until the duo performed the then reigning fraternity smash, "Soul Man."

I did not know it at the time, but Sam Moore had been almost literally picked-up out of the gutter for this series of dates and was deep in the belly of the beast of heroin addiction. I had heard though that Sam and Dave weren't on speaking terms and hated the sight of one another. But you could couldn't tell it this night.

Even playing for this spoiled, inattentive audience, the pair practically burned with the Holy Ghost of soul fever, their gutty, soaring voices wrapping themselves around the pullulating rhythms and verses carved out for them a decade earlier by Stax Records' most skilled songwriters. Sam Moore put on one of the two or three finest performances I have ever seen that night, reaching through that wall of impassivity to forever mark those of us who paused to listen. I would never have believed Sam was an addict and still have trouble believing they weren't pals for at least that night.

Of course the reunion didn't last long and no new recordings of note resulted from the respite in their feuding, but Sam is now a recovering addict and both singers perform regularly and separately.

Between 1965 and 1968 Sam and Dave ignited stages all over the world and recorded several milestone r&b numbers that crossed over bigtime into the pop charts. And as reported by Peter Guralnick, Otis Redding himself insisted that the "double dynamite" not appear on the same bookings with him; they were simply too smoking to match.

Although neither Sam nor Dave were songwriters, Stax producers wisely used their best songwriting talent for their recordings. Backed by the usual Stax rhythm section of Booker T and the MG's and the Mar-Keys, they recorded four albums that contained a transcendent body of work. The Best of Sam and Dave contains every masterpiece from the Sam and Dave canon, including seven songs not found on the LP.

Being a rabid fan of Sam and Dave, I was completely dissatisfied with the sound quality of the domestic LP. There was a great deal of improvement in Japanese vinyl pressings, but the material still sounded muddy and hissy. The compact disc is, again, a step above the vinyl and cassette versions available, but that is not always saying much. Some songs such as "You Don't Know Like I Know" and "Soul Man" pulsate with sound purity and punchiness. Other songs such as "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby" and "Soothe Me" have levels of hiss that are unacceptable no matter how you view it (and remastering whiz Steve Hoffman convinced me that a little hiss is preferrable to chopping off the high end).

No other Sam and Dave compilation has captured so completely and skillfully the full measure of this duo's peerless soul recordings as does this CD. Very little here is extraneous, and I cannot find one omission to blight the perfection of the assemblage. Even with my quibbles about portions of the sound, this disc is all-important to anyone serious about the soul metier. The gliding high tenor of Sam coupled with the grit and gospel winging of Dave makes for a vocal chemistry unsurpassed in popular music and perhaps only even approached by the Everly Brothers (whose voices are the best argument I know of for the existence of a God).

"Hold On, I'm Comin'" is on my list of ten best songs of all time (even though there are about 1000 songs on my ten best list), and if the thought of the Blues Brothers outselling all the Sam and Dave records combined didn't make me vomit, I would vote for "Soul Man" too. One can hardly do better than this disc.

--Tom Graves

My Long-Ass Interview with Frank Zappa (1987)

2005-01-04T13:58:00.000-08:00

The Rock & Roll Disc Interview: Frank Zappa

By Tom Graves

December 1987/January 1988

Frank Zappa is nothing if not an American original. As American youth swarmed to record stores in search of Monkees and Archies records (it should be noted that Zappa actually appeared on a Monkees TV segment) in the 1960's, Frank Zappa was honing his skills as a satirist of brilliance and as a major force in studio experimentation. On such early albums as Freak Out, Lumpy Gravy, and We’re Only In It For the Money, Zappa singlehandedly expanded much of the language and direction of rock music by constantly testing studio and audience limits and boldly broaching new musical frontiers.

Never at a loss for an opinion or razor comment, Zappa made headlines in 1985 when he took on the Washington wives of the PMRC during the infamous Danforth hearings. Other targets of his poison jibes have included hippies, drugs, disco music, and television evangelists.

At 47, Frank Zappa is still in the forefront of rock innovation and remains as controversial as ever.

–Tom Graves

Rock & Roll Disc: For a number of years I had considered Freak Out one of my back closet relics until I dusted it off and played it about five years ago. I was surprised at how viable it still seemed to me. Why do you think Freak Out, which is now over 20 years old, has retained its bite, wit, and innovation for this length of time?

Frank Zappa: Because some things just don’t change. The things that the songs are critical of in American society are still there today. So that is one of the reasons why the wit still works. It tells you two things: One, that the targets of the songs are still alive and kicking; and two, it shows you roughly how much humor is worth in the larger scale of things. Obviously, since I have been talking about the same topics for over 20 years and nothing has happened, it kind of proves that nothing ever will get changed.

R&RD: Many critics consider Freak Out to be the first concept album in rock music. How did you arrive at some of the sophisticated studio techniques this early in your career? You had only done a couple of minor movie soundtracks prior to this.

Zappa: As a matter of fact I did have studio experience because I owned a recording studio in Cucamonga, California before we even made that album. It was one of the few places in the world at that time where it was possible to do multi-track overdubs. Because of a man named Paul Buff, who is living in Memphis now I believe. Paul learned his electronic skill in the Marine Corps, got out and decided he wanted to go into the record business. And he built this recording studio which I later purchased from him. He built a homemade five-track recorder which operated on half-inch tape.

You have to remember that in 1962 when I purchased this there was only one other multi-track recording situation, and that was Les Paul’s. He had an eight-track machine, which was a custom device. And all the rest of the studios in Los Angeles were either stereo or at the most four-track. What Paul did was he built his own heads for the machine. At that time it was believed it was impossible to put any more than four heads that close together on one piece of tape. And so he laughed at everybody and set out and did it.

He was also one of the pioneers of 24-track recording, because on a subsequent job he had for a man in Los Angeles named Art Laboe [who has compiled oldies collections for LP and CD – T.G.] Art helped Paul get his job there and financed some of his inventions. One of them was a 10-track recorder where he built all the electronics for the machine and modified an Ampex half-inch recorder and had a brand new 10-track head stack put on the thing. Without Paul Buff a lot of the things that exist in the recording business today would not be there. He invented the Kepex. Do you know what that is?

R&RD: No, I’m afraid I don’t.

Zappa: It’s a noise gate device. He also invented a compressor called a Gain Brain. Paul had built this rather unusual recording studio in a town called Cucamonga, California. Shortly after I met him he was in debt, and he owed various vendors money for different things. He also owed back rent to his landlord. So I made an agreement with him where I took over the studio and its debts lock, stock, and barrel for a small amount of money. So I virtually lived in this recording studio for a year before the Freak Out album was made. I learned all the tricks of the trade that I knew at that time from Paul Buff and from working with the equipment in that studio.

R&RD: You’ve been outspoken in your views of Sgt. Pepper. How did your earlier work portend the Beatles’ experimentations on Sgt. Pepper, and do you feel that you have gotten the proper credit for the innovations you pioneered on those first albums of the Mothers?

Zappa: Well, for one thing it was reported in a few interviews of the time that John Lennon had heard the early stuff that we had done, and probably because of that some of the things that the Beatles later went on to do, and actually at least one of the albums the Rolling Stones later did, was directly traceable to the kind of weirdness we were doing at that time.

R&RD: Which Stones album, Their Satanic Majesties Request?

Zappa: Yeah, their psychedelic, quote, unquote, album.

R&RD: When I first became aware of the Mothers and Freak Out you had the wildest image of anyone in rock at that time. Everything about you seemed outrageous. How did you cultivate this image and what kind of trouble did it get you in?

Zappa: The funny thing was in order for you to get a job in Los Angeles during that period of time, just to work in a bar for example, you couldn’t walk in the door and even get an audition in that bar unless you had long hair or some kind of physical deformity. Because the bar owners were only booking bands that looked strange. I remember going to this one place in a suburb of Los Angeles in one of my nightly visits trying to find bars and clubs I could get our band to audition for. I walked in during the last set of this one group, and they had hair all the way down to the middle of their backs. And I went, “This is not possible.” These guys really looked tremendous, you know. The secret was when they walked off the stage they all pulled these wigs off, and they were like blond-haired surfers underneath it.

R&RD: Some of the guys in the Mothers weren’t really accustomed to long hair were they? Weren’t some of them really doo-woppers who wore pompadours?

Zappa: Well, a couple of the guys – Jimmy Black and Roy Estrada – lived in Orange County, which is another suburb of Los Angeles. It is a very right wing kind of an area, with a big John Birch presence down there…

R&RD: Richard Nixon lived there, right?

Zappa: Right, you got the aroma. So every time they would drive home to Orange County they had to hide their long hair. The way they would do it was they would stick it inside their collar and stuff it down their shirt and ride around with their shoulders hunched up so nobody looking in through the window would think they had long hair.

R&RD: What was the public’s reaction to your image at this time, on the streets and going into the grocery for example?

Zappa: I managed to raise a few eyebrows, but as far as the audiences went for the concerts, I think it didn’t make any difference to them what we looked like. They came there for whatever it was we were doing at the time, and we never advertised ourselves as fashion plates.

R&RD: What was it like in those early days playing for tourists at the Whisky A-Go-Go who had come to see Johnny Rivers?

Zappa: Well, that’s pretty funny. You have to understand that the Whisky A-Go-Go at that time was one of the primary places in the United States where a group could play to achieve major attraction. The guy who was the resident entertainer at the Whisky-A-Go-Go at that time was Johnny Rivers. They had a sign outside the place that had never been changed because he had worked over a year at this place. Just about the time we came along Johnny decided he wanted to go on the road. He had booked a tour that was going to take him out for five weeks and they needed somebody to replace him at the Whisky A-Go-Go.

If you don’t remember what Johnny Rivers sounded like, let me make it very clear that we didn’t sound anything like Johnny Rivers. Our audience was hardly Johnny’s audience. But somehow or another we wound up being his replacement for the five weeks at the Whisky A-Go-Go. But what they did was they left his sign up outside. So, they never changed the sign to put ours up because they didn’t want to let anybody know that he wasn’t there. People walking in there were in for a big shock when we started playing for them.

R&RD: How do you think digital technology could have improved the studio experimentations in We’re Only In It For the Money and Lumpy Gravy?

Zappa: In the case of Lumpy Gravy it would have been a real blessing. Lumpy Gravy is edited together out of hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny pieces of tape which took a long time to collect. First of all you have to find just the right little noise and things that are going to go in there, and then you have to manually cut these pieces of tape together with a razor blade. Anybody who has ever edited tape knows how boring that can be. Digital editing with the system I have now would have been a breeze with Lumpy Gravy, and all the edits would have been seamless. You could match levels from cut to cut even with the smallest segment and everything could have been done real slick. That would have made that one a lot easier to do.

R&RD: What about with We're Only In It For the Money? Could digital sound have added a lot of nuance, for example to the whispers and speeded-up voices in it?

Zappa: Well it could have enhanced it more if all those things were recorded on multi-track tape and you could have gone in and dubbed them out at a later date or changed the track balances. But some of those things were not. They were recorded direct to two-track and then some things were eight-track mixed down and some things were recorded direct. There's no question that if all this technology had been available then better things could have been done, but that's pretty much the story of my career. Right from the beginning I knew certain things were technically possible but the gear wasn't available at the time to do it. And finally years later when the gear comes on line and it's available, what happens? The big groups get it for free and I gotta go out and scrounge and find ways to buy this stuff, and it's ungodly expensive.

R&RD: You have your own digital studio now, right?

Zappa: That's right.

R&RD: And you have had it for how long, four or five years?

Zappa: The studio itself was operational in 1980. We got the digital gear in there by about 1982. That's when I first bought the digital multi-track machines.

R&RD: How do you like it?

Zappa: Well if that's a yes or no question then the answer is yes, it's great. It makes things a lot easier.

R&RD: Do you think there has been a turning away from experimentation in rock music towards the basics like Springsteen and Bryan Adams seem to have done? If so do you think rock music is missing out by adhering so strongly to these roots? Is it preventing artistic growth?

Zappa: One of the things that ought to be debated right here and now is whether or not -- when you say "back to basics" whether the basics you are describing is something that ought to be admired. As far as I'm concerned the real essence of American culture, the basics of being American is being an experimenter, being a pioneer. You can't be a pioneer if you stick your head in the sand and continue to rehash old stuff. I would point out to you that the beginning of the dark ages of rock and roll pretty much took effect when Reagan went into office. One thing that you ought to look at is the linkage in all the different art forms. Like, for example in motion pictures where the reliance on remakes and rehashed old titles has been characteristic over the last seven years.

R&RD: You mean this whole craving for nostalgia.

Zappa: Well nostalgia is one thing. But the idea of not taking a chance, which is what you do when you make Jaws 4, Jaws 5, Rocky 9, and everything over and over and over again. When you are forced into that position and tell yourself that you are prudent because you are doing it, you're just kind of giving it all up. You've kind of reduced the whole concept of making entertainment to something really mundane. But on the other hand you can also look at that and say what the arts have done is to reflect the reality of life under Reagan.

R&RD: What about the disco era of the 70's prior to Reagan? Many people look at that as the dark ages of rock and roll.

Zappa: I would disagree with that simply because of this: Disco was a functional type of music. We may be using the term music loosely here. Disco was designed for a specific function. It was wallpaper to be used in the background of the lifestyle of the people who inhabited those disco places. And those places were basically meatracks. The function of this music was to provide this rhythmic dance texture while people went to the meatrack. If you are going to have a meatrack why would you have anything more intelligent than disco? It seems to me to be perfectly designed for its usage.

R&RD: Does it bother you at all that your music is very demanding of the listener?

Zappa: It bothers me that listeners find it demanding. I don't try to figure out how I'm going to be demanding in the music. What I write is natural to me, and if people have difficulty with it, it is not my fault. It is their fault.

R&RD: Do you think there are times when you have carried experimentation too far?

Zappa: No. You can experiment and you can fail. But then even the failure is a success in itself. Because you took that direction, you got the answer, and there's the answer. You've presented the answer as a documentation. At least somebody took the step and found out what happens if you put this with this, that with that, and try it.

R&RD: Can you tell us a little about the litigation involved in obtaining your early recordings? They were gone from the shelves for a long time, and the collectibility of albums such as Freak Out climbed and remain quite high.

Zappa: There have been at least three law suits, maybe four law suits, between me and record companies leading to the point that I'm at now where I own those masters. I had to sue MGM Records, I've sued Warner Brothers, and I've sued CBS. In fact I've sued Warner Brothers twice. The amount of time I've spent in court -- with MGM it was eight years and another eight years for the Warner Brothers case. So think about it. The bulk of the time I have been in the recording industry I've had ongoing legal battles with the companies that have released this material.

R&RD: Isn't that mentally exhausting for you to be tangled up in legal matters for that long?

Zappa: If I had my choice between going to court or writing a song I think I'd rather write a song. There's a song on You Are What You Is called "Charlie's Enormous Mouth," and I actually wrote that song during a break in the depositions for the Warner Brothers trials. I was deposed for 40 days, and on one of these boring days the lawyers were arguing about something in the other room, and I just went into an office and wrote those lyrics on a pad. It helps keep your mind off some of these things. But the fact of the matter is most artists don't like their record companies. They wimp out when it gets down to the wire, and they don't sue often enough.

If there is anybody reading this who has got a career in the music business, if you don't already know, the saying in the business is like this: nobody ever audited a record company and found out that they were not owed something more than what the statement told you. That's why they have auditors. But the fact of the matter is, the cost of suing a record company, and the time element of suing a record company, and the emotional drain of fighting one of those kinds of battles is something that most artists don't want to put up with. But in my case, I've never been a multi-platinum selling artist, and they were screwing me! What do you think they are doing to the guys who are really selling multi-platinum? If they're doing it to me, then they're doing it to everybody.

R&RD: The Beatles I believe are now tied up in litigation because Capitol Records allegedly unloaded truckloads of their records off the books.

Zappa: That's an old story. They did the same thing to all the artists, as far as I could tell, at MGM. One of the things that was going on there was one of the most popular albums in the mid-60s was the soundtrack to Doctor Zhivago. And they got caught shipping at least a quarter of a million of those things out the back door of the pressing plant in Terre Haupt, Indiana. Apparently the stuff was going into the back of somebody's truck and being traded for roomfuls of furniture in another state. Weird stuff like this.

They would do it by a process called pressing overruns. In other words the record company would send the masters over to the plant, say "print 10,000 of this title." Of course they would print 15,000 and the 5,000 extra would go out the back door and be traded for something of value, and the artist would find on his statement that only 10,000 had been pressed. That's simplifying it, but that's one of the ways they would screw you in those days.

R&RD: Allen Klein has made a career out of going in and auditing record company books hasn't he?

Zappa: Here's a good Allen Klein story. He used to handle the Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones have a company called Nanker Phelge. If the group has jointly composed the song then the song goes into the Nanker Phelge company. So the story I heard was that Allen Klein had set up the deal with the record company for the Rolling Stones and had told the record company that the funds that are to be paid to Nanker Phelge should be sent to a bank account in New York City, when in fact it was his account in New York City. But the Nanker Phelge account that the Stones had was in London!

R&RD: Lumpy Gravy and Ruben and the Jets seem in retrospect to have been incredible artistic gambles in the 60s. Did they seem so to you at the time?

Zappa: It just seemed like that's what I was supposed to be doing. I don't look at things as being a gamble or not. My basic philosophy is this: If I'm interested in a certain type of musical style or a topic during that period of time I follow my own trail, finish the project, and present it to the public. And those people who have the same interests as me will like it, and the ones who don't won't. And I'll just take my chances. But it's not making a calculated gamble to change my direction. I work on whatever I'm interested in that week or that year or that month.

R&RD: The song "Trouble Every Day" on Freak Out was an angry indictment of the times. After looking back at the releases of the day it seems to be one of the first implicit social commentaries in rock. Was it considered inflammatory at the time?

Zappa: It was considered inflammatory at the time, but we're talking explicit not implicit. That song does spell it out. You have to remember what the Watts riots were. They were the first major race riots in contemporary history. People just didn't know how to deal with it. The television stations in Los Angeles were covering this thing like it was a real news spectacle...

R&RD: Like the Super Bowl of riots?

Zappa: Right. And the line [in the song] about the woman driver being machine-gunned from her seat, that really happened. It was a lady, and the news announced, "Yeah, this woman has been sawed in half by 50 caliber machine gun bullets by the National Guard." That's what the Watts riots were. It wasn't quaint, it wasn't cute, it was like "what in the world is going on here?" And it was only a few miles from where I lived.

R&RD: But was this song in fact a first of its kind? It was much longer than the average Top 40 hit and blistering in its outlook.

Zappa: One of the things that it derives from is there has been a tradition in blues lyrics to tell social stories. A lot of people in the pop music world are unfamiliar with the world of folk music or the world of blues lyrics. I had grown up listening to blues records, so that kind of form wasn't unfamiliar [to me]. But the things that were being spoken about in the folk songs and the blues records were not generally major news stories. There was a guy named J.B. Lenoir who had a couple of songs, "The Eisenhower Blues" and "I Am In Korea." If you can ever find those records and listen to those things they were made in the early 50's. That would be some of the roots the Watts riots songs would come from. Maybe it was unique for a white person's rock and roll to stick something like that in it, but in other musical forms that kind of style had existed to a degree.

R&RD: On Uncle Meat you again took what is considered to be a radical departure towards jazz and jazz fusion. Why did you decide to risk working in this more musically complex and demanding setting?

Zappa: There are two reasons why the music I put out on a record at any given time will sound the way it does. Reason number one is whether or not that style is something I'm interested in during that period of time. And two, who's in the band. What are their assets, what are their liabilities. At that particular time of recording Uncle Meat we had Art Tripp, who is a conservatory-trained percussionist. We also had Ruth Underwood -- she wasn't in the band but she was working on the sessions. We had Ian Underwood who was a conservatory-trained guy. And we had Bunk Gardner, who I don't know if he was conservatory-trained, but he was like a schooled musician. They were in the same band with guys like Motorhead Sherwood, Billy Mundi, Jimmy Carl Black, and Roy Estrada. It was a real strange mix of guys who could read and had been to school and guys who were just regular guys. Suppose you were me and you had these human resources to deal with, what would you make out of it?

R&RD: Not something nearly as interesting as Uncle Meat I can assure you.

Zappa: You know you take your chances with the material that is available to you at the time. The other thing that will determine what an album sounds like is how much money there is to make the album. That money translates into studio time, it translates into rehearsal time, things like that. All of the early Mothers albums were done on really low budgets. There wasn't enough studio time to go in and perfect anything. It wasn't until I got my own studio that I could take as much time to work on an album as I really needed. So the bulk of my career has been done under duress.

R&RD: What is the latest on the Tipper Gore, PMRC front?

Zappa: I just debated Albert Gore's campaign manager on a radio station in Los Angeles. I don't know whether it's been reported here, but they came to Los Angeles to have a closed door meeting with big shots of the entertainment industry to kind of allay their anxieties that Mr. and Mrs. Gore really weren't interested in censorship. That was the supposed theme of this meeting. Now I was not invited to the meeting. I read about it in the papers after it had happened. But generally speaking, the newspaper commentary on the thing was not favorable and most of the people in show business were not all that impressed with what the Gores had to say. They were kind of apologetic about the hearings that they had held in Washington in '85. They were trying to give the impression that they had gotten a bum rap about all this censorship business, that they in fact could be trusted if Albert did get elected and he wouldn't harm the show business world. Now you decide. Is anybody buying this or what?

R&RD: Do you think the PMRC may be losing steam at this point?

Zappa: They just released their first video you know. It was reported in Billboard last week. The PMRC through a Christian distributing company has released a full-length video about rock and roll lyrics which features four-letter words and frontal nudity. I figure this is a major step forward for a Christian distribution company. That's what Tipper and the girls are into now.

R&RD: What do you think of the Gores' admissions to smoking dope? And especially Tipper's where she smoked dope just once?

Zappa: Well let me put it to you this way: To me that is the best reason for people not to smoke marijuana. You see she smoked it just once and look what happened to her. He smoked it, how many times?, and look what happened to him.

R&RD: My God, he's wanting to run for President!

Zappa: That's right (laughter).

R&RD: Did you meet with Tipper and Albert Jr. for a drink after the Danforth Committee hearings? What was that like?

Zappa: It was kind of interesting. I must say I don't dislike them as people. I think basically they are probably nice people. I haven't spent enough time with them to give you a complete character analysis or anything. We met in a kind of bar/restaurant in Washington, D.C. called the Monocle at about six o'cock in the evening. It was like happy hour in the bar and it was jam-packed with all these senators and all these people who do that nasty business in Washington, D.C., and we were at a table in the back.

We just talked about this whole record rating business, and I asked them some questions about things I had come across that I had experienced in California and asked them to either substantiate or deny what these things were. And I asked for some background information on the hearings themselves. For example, I said "Why is Paula Hawkins...what was she doing there?" And Albert Gore said, "Well, basically Paula was a Republican in trouble." She was having trouble getting reelected in Florida, and she prevailed on Senator Danforth to let her make an appearance at the committee because she thought that it might be good. So the whole thing was a show trial from the word go. Danforth went along with the thing. It was just a waste of the taxpayers' money and was a bunch of nothingness.

R&RD: The hearing seems like a subversion of everything America is supposed to stand for.

Zappa: It is more than a subversion, it's an actual violation of Senate rules. My understanding is you don't have a hearing unless you are talking about legislation. And it was clear from that hearing that they were not talking about legislation. And in fact Senator Exon from Nebraska asked the question in the middle of the hearing, "If we are not talking about legislation why are we here?" And that didn't even get reported in the news. And when he said it it got a round of applause at the hearing. The other thing people have to remember is the committee that heard this matter had five members on it, five senators, who were married to women who belonged to the PMRC or signed the original PMRC complaint letter to the record industry. So it was a kangaroo court. If they were talking about legislation it would have been pretty unusual to have the husbands of the complainants sitting there judging the matter.

R&RD: What kind of hate mail do you get?

Zappa: Little or none. We get some amazing fan mail. Well, here's one example of hate mail. During that PMRC business in '85 I got a greeting card from a man, and he said he was an Italian, but that he was born again. He was incensed that as an Italian I would be out there fighting against this. That's about the extent of it. I think it is an erroneous conclusion that you would think that a person such as myself would get masses of hate mail. That is not true. Most of the people who write to me -- I'm talking about 99% of the people who write to me -- are absolutely delighted that I'm doing what I'm doing, that I continue to do what I've been doing for the last 20 years, and to urge me to keep doing it and do more of it. There it is.

R&RD: Could you give us a quick appraisal of the talk shows you've been on? You had a rather high profile on television during the PMRC hearings.

Zappa: First of all name the ones that I haven't done. I haven't done Donahue and Oprah Winfrey.

R&RD: Why, because the powers that be don't want you to have a forum for that long?

Zappa: (Laughs) Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't think I would enjoy Donahue just because of the style of the show, and I was actually invited to do Oprah Winfrey when she was still a regional show in Chicago, but I didn't make it. And the other one that I haven't done is Sonya Friedman, which I would not do because I don't like her show, and I don't like what it stands for. I kind of enjoy doing them if the interviewer can hold a good conversation, and that's not often the case. I thought Johnny Carson was a nice guy to talk with, and he surprised me when I went on the show because when I was brought on I was told that we were only going to talk about Miami Vice. He didn't want to talk about politics or anything else. He surprised everybody by talking about censorship, and he told me before the show that he had stayed up -- you know those Senate hearings when they were broadcast live, they didn't broadcast them completely. Just before I went on to testify they switched to the Senate floor. Consequently they reran the whole thing on Saturday and Sunday at two o'clock in the morning. Johnny Carson said that he stayed up and watched them. Which also surprised me, the idea that Johnny Carson sits around watching C-span on the weekends is pretty fascinating.

R&RD: Speaking for myself, I was extremely annoyed that Carson relegated you to the last five minutes of the show in that Phantom Zone where they put anyone with opinions.

Zappa: That’s true on every talk show.

R&RD: But they had some lady with an egg collection who went on and on and on. She took up nearly the whole show.

Zappa: Want to know the story about the egg lady?

R&RD: Sure.

Zappa: She had a vision that she was going to be on Johnny Carson and she called them. And it was so off the wall. She called them from some kind of phone booth in a shopping mall in New Jersey or something like that and they said, “Oh this has got to be great.” And they brought her out just because she got in contact with them. It was just off the wall, and it didn’t turn out to be quite as good as they thought it was going to be. And they devoted this major segment of the show to it.

R&RD: Which I thought was a big mistake.

Zappa: Well don’t tell me, tell them.

R&RD: What about the Joan Rivers show. That one seemed a little amiss.

Zappa: First of all she opened the show by making fun of my children, which I’m not going to be too enthusiastic about no matter who’s saying it. You can only talk about what they want to talk about or what they’ll let you talk about. Because a talk show host, if he’s really afraid of his job, is always going to change the subject, or they can beep you or whatever. I did the Tom Snyder show years ago when he was on television, and I found that to be a really difficult interview. But I did his new radio show about a month ago and that was really good. It was his first broadcast of a new show. He had the ABC network executives outside the window watching what was going on, some of these middle management guys pacing back and forth. I happened to go on this tirade about Pat Robertson, calling him a fraud and saying the guy ought to be brought up for tax fraud and all the rest of this stuff, and they were pissing their pants out there in the hall. It is usually easier to get away with this stuff on radio than it is to get away with it on television. Television broadcasters are…to say that they were chickenshit would be absolutely too kind.

R&RD: What do you think about the Jim and Tammy Bakker episodes of late?

Zappa: I think it’s great that it happened. It’s unfortunate that it took so long to happen. You have to remember that the fundamentalist right in the United States is one of the main reasons why Reagan is in office. It is a little known fact that not only did Jim and Tammy attend the inauguration but Reagan gave them a humanitarian award in ’83. They are right in there together, you know. I think it’s great that Jim and Tammy were exposed. I just wish the exposure had been more thorough. I think that the media pussyfooted around the issue of whether or not Jim Bakker was having sex with a man. I think they could have been a little more assiduous in following that up and getting some conclusive evidence out.

I think the word has yet to be delivered on the financial wrongdoing of PTL. I think they’re not being as aggressive as they can with that. Let me give you one theory as to why the IRS has not been doing its job in terms of these television ministries. You have to understand that [television evangelists] make their money because they are tax exempt. And in order to keep the tax exemption they may not, according to the law, lobby for or against any political candidate or any legislation. They are supposed to be religions and not involved in politics. It gets into at the very least a grey area, and in my view it’s all completely black and white, that religion is religion and politics is politics. If you have a tax exemption and if you’re building empires with tax exempt money, then somebody should make you hold to the mark as to how you earn that money.

The IRS’s job is to enforce this law. The problem of enforcing it is that the people who are auditors for the IRS are usually not the cream of the auditing crop. For example, the starting salary for an IRS auditor is about $14,000 a year. The same guy in the private sector gets $23,000. So usually they don’t get the best talent at the IRS. The other thing is that auditing often takes place at regional offices. So if you are in the Bible Belt somewhere then an auditor for any of these pseudo-religious organizations is probably going to be a member of that community, who may even belong to that church. Do you think he’s really going to go in there and look at the fine print in the books? I don’t think so, and I think that’s another reason why these guys have been able to get away with murder all this time. The other thing is this current administration owing its butt as it does to the fundamentalist right certainly has not been too strong in pushing for compliance with the regulations that lets them be tax exempt. I don’t think there’s been any effort by the Reagan administration to say yeah, go out there and do what the law says to do. Check their books and see whether or not they’ve lived up to this exemption. The reason they won’t do that is when they violated their exemptions and got into politics, they got into Republican politics and actually helped to put Reagan in office. That’s why they have flourished.

R&RD: In the book out now on Saturday Night Live it reports that you and the Prime Time Players did not work out too well together. Would you care to give your side of the story?

Zappa: Well the guy [who was quoted about me in the book] happens to be a person that I spoke to only briefly during the time that I was there, and I did the show twice. He was not the major writer or one of the major writers on Saturday Night Live. I think you know the guy and the kind of material that he and his partner would put on the show, absolutely the weakest element in the Saturday Night Live show. Nobody ever turned that show on to see Al Franken and his partner.

Here’s what it was like at Saturday Night Live in those days: If I were from the DEA and I wanted to make my quota for the year all I would have had to do was walk onto the 15th floor of Rockefeller Center. There were more drugs on that floor than I have ever seen openly displayed anywhere. In fact in the office of the aforementioned [writer] we are talking about plastic bags of every known form of pill in every color. And in another office with one of the major talents of the show the office consisted of a desk, two bunk beds, and a haystack of marijuana on the desk. That’s all that was in the office. So that’s the atmosphere of the times. Now, I don’t exactly fit in with people who have that as a lifestyle. I don’t use drugs. If somebody else wants to use them fine, but I’m not a party guy. I came there to work. If there was any friction between me and the people who worked there, let’s just say it was an anthropological difference.

R&RD: While we are on the subject of drugs, it is well-known that you do not use drugs. Did you at any time ever experiment with them?

Zappa: For social purposes in the early 60’s I tried to smoke marijuana. And I say tried because every time I smoked it it made me sleepy and gave me a sore throat. I’ve never gotten high from it and I could never understand why people would smoke this stuff. But because I like tobacco I said, “well, why don’t I try this?” If I were to calculate there probably wouldn’t be over 10 marijuana cigarettes in my entire lifetime that were ever passed to me. Not that I sat there and really smoked 10 joints, but if you’re with a bunch of people and they hand you that…It’s not the world that I wanted to be in. As far as cocaine, never. LSD, never. Speed, never. Heroin, never. Anything with a needle attached to it, give me a break. Who needs it.

R&RD: For what it’s worth I’m in complete agreement. I’m one of the few music writers who totally abhors drugs.

Zappa: I find it unfortunate that drug use is so extensive in the United States, but let’s be philosophically clear: It is not my position to be somebody’s dad other than for my own children. If somebody wants to use drugs that is their right if they choose to harm themselves that way. The part that becomes a public concern is if that person under the influence of those chemical substances – I would include liquor in that – that person becomes a menace to other members of society then it’s bad. If you’re just sitting at home and you want to get yourself wrecked, or even if you want to commit suicide, I feel that you own your own body. You might as well do whatever you want with it. But you don’t have the right to harm other people because of what you do to yourself. The extent to which Americans are willing to hurt themselves and then hurt other people by proxy is what is the worst aspect of the drug situation in the U.S. Because it has gone beyond recreation.

R&RD: If there had not been any such thing as drugs how do you think rock music would have been different?

Zappa: I think it still would have been rock-like because a lot of it is based on alcohol. If you subtract the hard liquor from heavy metal then what have you got?

R&RD: Why is no one in rock music today willing to push the frontiers as you did in the 60’s?

Zappa: You couldn’t even get a record contract today, because of the people who run the record companies. They have made the decision that to be successful you have to be like Michael Jackson. Let’s face it, if you are experimental the chance that you will make millions of dollars is not good. Record companies only want things that make millions and millions of dollars. When we first got a record contract with MGM the advance we received for signing was $2,500 divided between five guys.

R&RD: I’ll bet that didn’t go very far.

Zappa: You ain’t kidding. Today if I had a group called the Mothers of Invention and I went out to get a contract I couldn’t get a contract anywhere. There’s not a company on the planet that would sign a group like that.

R&RD: Who out there today is doing something in music you find interesting?

Zappa: I’ve seen a couple of videos recently that I thought were not only interesting videos but good songs and good performances. One is “Living In A Box” by Living In A Box on the album Living In A Box. I wasn’t that impressed with their second video, but I think the guy is a good singer. I thought the track sounded great. The other is “Daddy’s Coming Home” by Walk the Moon. Especially the guitar was interesting in that.

R&RD: What about some of the critics’ favorites such as Bruce Springsteen?

Zappa: I met Bruce one time. I was brought backstage to one his shows when he was working at the Palladium in New York, and he seemed like a nice enough guy. But that is not my style of music.

R&RD: For someone who has accomplished as much as you have artistically, where do you go next? What can we expect from Frank Zappa in the future? Where will you be taking us?

Zappa: Well, you can expect a tour which begins February with a 12-piece band and a five-piece horn section in it. I’ve got a whole bunch more CD product coming out next year, and of course there’s all the Honker Home Video product of which the first two titles were released Oct. 28. The next two will be in February, then there’s two more that will be coming out around June next year. You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore, a live compact disc series, will begin in February. One double-CD set will be released each month, February through August, making a total of 12 CDs. Nothing else like it.

R&RD: How do you think the public will react to such a monumental CD set?

Zappa: The people who like what I do will love it, and the people who don’t like what I do will find it inconsequential.

Stop the Presses -- Wedding Bells Are Ringing!!!!

2004-12-24T14:27:00.001-08:00

Happy Holidays to all our friends out there, from Tom and Bintu:

Many of you may have been wondering why you haven’t heard from me or Bintu in many weeks now. We have both been so busy setting up house that we have had virtually no time for socializing at all. Right now, with snow and ice keeping us homebound, we definitely aren’t doing much socializing. Keep in mind that Bintu has never in her life braved cold like we are now having – when she first came to Memphis she was cold all the time. It’s remarkable how well and fast she has adapted. Yes she gets cold just like the rest of us, but is handling it pretty well considering.

The big news here is that Bintu has finally made an honest man of me. On Dec. 22nd we went down to Judge Blancett at the Juvenile Court who performed a very sweet and short wedding ceremony for us. So we are officially hitched at this point.

We kept this on the down-low for a number of reasons. First, we had to play a numbers game with Immigration who insist, upon deportation threats, that if you bring someone over on a fiancé visa you must marry within 90 days. If someone is from a third world country, which Senegal is considered despite its cosmopolitan flair, he or she cannot come to this country unless they are: a student with tuition pre-paid, a visitor here for a very short and specific limited time, or as a fiance. The U.S. does not grant long engagements, but we took advantage of our timeframe and settled in together as best we could before the official day. The government putting a gun to your head is not exactly my idea of great romance, but we are making the most of it, are very happy, and when the judge told us we could seal the marriage with a kiss (and of course I didn’t pass that up) Bintu broke down in my arms and cried great tears of joy. Me being the manly man I am of course I shed not a tear. (You do believe that don’t you?).

Although Bintu is unofficially working, we now have many more things to do. We must get her re-classified as a spouse, re-fingerprinted, and send in her application for a green card. Total: about $550.00. I’ve got to get her medical insurance, get her enrolled in driving school, begin looking for a nice used car cheap (anyone got one?), send in her forms with translations for her beautician re-certification which probably means she will have to go some to beautician school here, get her more winter clothes, enroll her at Mid-South Community College, which is a perk for us teachers, and so on. My mom and my daughter Allison both know that we are in the process of marriage, but we are waiting until after Christmas weekend to make our announcement to them just so there are no surprises at the dinner table carving the turkey. So, they know but they don’t know.

The past few days Bintu has spent getting in touch with her African friends and family to tell them the good news about us. You would not believe how happy they are for us both. As I have told you before in these narratives, they ALL believe God/Allah is responsible for the two of us being brought together. I cannot argue with this. To show you how seriously we are taken in Senegal and Sierra Leone, I learned something very heart-warming from our friend Mohammed who is a Sierra Leonean transplanted to Dakar after the civil war. He is the young man who, like hundreds of other people during the war, had both of his hands chopped off by machete by the rebels, many of whom were children who were kidnapped from their homes and villages and jacked up on drugs and turned into the most vicious killers imaginable. Mohammed is a handsome young man and his pretty wife, Fatmata, is expecting their first child. Mohammed told me from Africa that if the child is a boy, it will be named after me. If it is a girl it will be named after Bintu. I’ve spent 39 years in this world (yeah, it worked for Jack Benny, so maybe it will for me too) and this is the first time anyone ever bestowed such an honor upon me. I cannot tell you how deeply honored I am. I hope it is a boy. But don’t tell Bintu I said so.

My African connections are deepening as well. Not only are our ties strong in Senegal and Sierra Leone, but the African community in Memphis is rapidly becoming a new world to me too. Of course I already had many African acquaintances here and abroad, but I am now a real part of this community. Already next weekend we are invited to not one but two New Year’s events hosted by our African friends. It is rare when Bintu doesn’t get at least a phone call a day from an African friend or relative. At a recent Sierra Leonean naming ceremony (for a child) we were subjected to the loudest deejays I have ever heard, playing all manner of African music (and they threw in the Electric Slide/Cha-cha for good measure too). One song had an African rapper/singer who sounded like a cross between Howlin’ Wolf and the late zydeco growler Beau Jacques. I WILL find who he is and WILL get his CD.

As has happened to me so many times, when I got on the dance floor, all eyes were upon me. I have been the lone white ranger on the dance floor too many times to count. All my black friends know that white people, men in particular, cannot dance. White men on the dance floor are waiting to make fools of themselves. But somewhere along the line I learned to walk and chew gum at the same time and can actually dance with some soul. A white boy that can dance is something to marvel at and at the African party no one said a word (unlike the juke joints where I have literally been yanked from my seat to dance) but they all KNEW. Bintu, of course, thinks this is pretty hilarious. She tells me all the time: “Tom, you know you are not white. You just look that way.”

Many weeks before Bintu came over I went to the Saro African market in Hickory Hill to pick up a few grocery goods I knew she would want, like that nasty Nescafe the Senegalese love so much. Naturally they wanted to know why I, a Memphis white boy, was wanting to buy things like cassava leaf. In the course of conversation the shop owner told me that a Sierra Leonean couple were at the front of the store and I should speak to them. Knowing it would be extremely rude to decline, I struck up a conversation with the couple and they were beyond nice. They insisted that we contact them again after Bintu arrived and the lady gave me her card with her phone number. When I told Bintu the good news she reacted very coolly. Well, actually she reacted heatedly. She was incensed that I had allowed a S.L. woman to give me her phone number. It seems that S.L.s have a reputation throughout Africa as husband stealers and Bintu would have none of that. After Bintu came she reluctantly called Teresa, and they have become great friends. And Teresa hasn't stolen me yet.

Last but not least of the news: Bintu and I are planning a REAL wedding celebration on Friday, March 18th. That date is very special to us. It marks the anniversary of my coming to Dakar to be with her. The day we first got together for real. We will be sending out invitations and we plan on having the full ceremony, African style. Our plans are to have a traditional but African wedding where we dress up, have an African reverend officiate, repeat the traditional vows, and then have one hell of a party afterwards. I am not too fond of long, boring ceremonies myself, and I promise this one won’t be. And if you miss the reception, well, you’ve missed the most fun you will have had for a long time. I can promise a mix of great music, a mix of great food, a mix of great people, a mix of dancing the likes you’ve never seen, and the tallest married couple in Memphis.

We have much to do and much we want to accomplish. We hope to hear from each of you, and you will all be hearing from us too.

Love to all,
Mr. Thomas Alan Graves and
Mrs. Bintou Ndiaye Graves

Stop the Presses --

2004-12-24T14:27:00.000-08:00

Tickets for Bintu Anyone?

2004-11-03T13:35:00.000-08:00

Hello friends:

Well, Bintu and I are closing in on month one together in Memphis. We won't pretend that our coming together of cultures and worlds has been seamless -- as expected there has been a bump or two in the road. She has had homesickness off and on, good days and bad days at the First African Braiding Salon, a fruitless rain-soaked evening of trying for the first time to catch a bus ride home, a body that is used to African water and not Memphis water, that sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach when everything you eat has an alien taste to it.

Ah, but the good side: she has found lots of foods that she likes after eating for the first time. She loves the Sonic Burger No. 1, the Chinese buffet at New Hunan, chicken fried rice from Yum's, and Tom Graves' special filet mignon with super fluffy baked potato. She also thinks my hand-prepared chocolate shakes are pretty good. As mentioned earlier, she found the smoked fish she likes best, and the whole house greets me with the smell when she soaks it in water as per cooking instructions. She is looking forward to Thanksgiving and her first ever turkey dinner. I wish I had all that cajun cooking stuff to make a cajun fried turkey but alas I don't.

We have had so much to do these past weeks that we've only rarely gone out to socialize, but that is now changing fast. Thanks to Marty Priola, Bintu went to her first American party and loved the food (Marty is a great host and cook) and the company and conversation. The ladies at the party seemed fascinated by Bintu and made her feel very welcome with their conversation. She thought it was very funny when I went in the house to fetch her something and one lady demanded to know, conspiritorially, just how it was we met. No one came to our house for Halloween, so she sort of missed that, but I did take her to a neighborhood haunted house, which at one point caused her to scream bloody murder, much to her amusement later.

I did manage to take her to the zoo, which she loved. Remember, Bintu is a city girl and has never in her life seen lions, tigers, or elephants. At first she was VERY wary of the big cats until I assured her they would not be able to break through the security barrier. A big chimpanzee came over to the window and studied Bintu for some time. The gorilla was a favorite of hers, especially after a tiny little Asian girl, maybe two years old, stood on top of the railing and beat her chest and hollered like King Kong. We all cracked up over that one. The snakes, which she HAS seen in Africa, were the scariest things of all to her. Some of the really huge pythons nearly had her running out of the place.

I'm pausing at this point to ask my friends for some favors: Many of you have access to freebie tickets of one kind or another. At this moment Bintu and I are forced to watch our budget pretty closely, so any freebies you may run across would be appreciated. She would be interested in almost anything that she has not seen before, such as:

A football game, such as a U of M one at the stadium

A basketball game, at the FedEx forum either of the Grizzlies or U of M

other neat sporting events including wrestling

exhibitions of any kind, such as at the Dixon, Brooks, Agricenter, etc.

theater events

all kinds of music events

tickets to the movies (she hasn't been to one of our cinemas yet)

other things you can think of.

What I am saying is if you run across a couple of routine tickets that you don't plan to use or you have some extras, hey, we'd love to explore new things together.

Okay. That's it for now. Let us hear from you.

Tom

Defending The Doors and Jim Morrison

2004-11-01T16:30:00.000-08:00

Review of The Doors In Concert by Tom Graves

As much as I would feel vindicated by a kick ass live set by the Doors, who I have defended against some of rock criticism’s biggest hired guns, I’ve got to come to terms with the fact that the Doors live were a pretty lousy band – at least on every live document (including bootlegs) I’ve ever heard. It should be remembered that the Doors initially earned their stripes as a club band playing small, noisy venues such as the Whiskey A Go Go in L.A. – places where their sound and theatrics filled the room from wall to wall. I’ve known a few people who saw the Doors at the Whiskey before being signed to Elektra and consider the performances there among the high points of their life.

But as fame spoiled them and they began to play large halls and coliseums, every problem evident in the band’s set-up became magnified a hundred-fold. As many have pointed out, the Doors lacked a solid rhythm section. They desperately needed a bass player (Manzarek’s bass organ just couldn’t cut it) and an extra rhythm guitarist to shore-up their watery sound. Although John Densmore was certainly a gifted, tasteful drummer, he was a small man who lacked the physical power needed to propel the music into high gear. I think Robby Krieger was a stinging, highly original guitar player with a multitude of innovative texturings, but all too often in concert there was nothing to really anchor his guitar; it skittered over the numbing drone of Manzarek’s keyboards with no foothold to dig into. And Manzarek, although capable of stunning organ and piano passages (like “Break On Through” and “Riders On the Storm” if you want examples) was inherently incapable of pounding out a respectable rhythm and blues.

The Doors In Concert is comprised of Absolutely Live, the wretched Alive She Cried, and Live At the Hollywood Bowl, plus an unreleased live version of “The End.” Although I’m a strong and unapologetic supporter of Jim Morrison – I think he was one of rock and roll’s most charismatic and distinctive vocalists – what we get here is a man in a state of artistic and physical disintegration. Songs like “Backdoor Man” and “Petition the Lord With Prayer” are so histrionic that they are unintentionally hilarious, at least until one remembers how seriously the Doors took themselves. I think it’s fair to say that not a single track on In Concert wasn’t performed better on the studio LPs, making this set redundant and worthless.

I must admit I have never understood the complete dismissal of the Doors by so many notable critics, nor have I figured out the logic behind the “they were a great singles band” faction. The Doors, Strange Days, and Morrison Hotel were great albums, and those who focus only on the catchy fluff like “Hello, I Love You” and “Touch Me” to the exclusion of legitimate rock epics like “The End” and “When the Music’s Over” or biting, soulful white blues like “Soul Kitchen,” “Love Me Two Times,” and “Roadhouse Blues” are missing the whole point of what made the Doors a great band.

Yeah, Jim Morrison was a joke as a poet, but what so many miss is that he was a brilliant lyricist (check out “Moonlight Drive” for a taste). After listening to this dreck I plan to load up the player with Morrison Hotel or The Doors, head for the fridge, and grab myself a be-ah.

Interview with British Cult Icon Lee Mavers of the La's

2004-11-01T13:19:00.000-08:00

Writer – Tom Graves
Mag. – Rock & Roll Disc
Date: September, 1991
Subject: Interview with Lee Mavers of The La’s

Have Mersey

An Interview with The La’s Driving Force and Angriest Member, Lee Mavers

By Tom Graves

Just when you think you’ve seen or heard everything that could happen in the music business, something like the La’s imbroglio comes along. The La’s in 1988 and ’89 practically owned the music scene in their hometown of Liverpool, where there hadn’t been so much excitement for a new Mersey band since four mop-topped lads created a mania of their own nearly 30 years ago.

Record company executives flocked to their sold-out club gigs, and Polygrams’ London label quickly snapped them up, ready to promote the La’s as their major new artists of the year. London had enough confidence in this untested band to hire famed producer Steve Lillywhite (U2 among many others to his credit) to be at the helm for their debut recording, and he was obviously impressed with the talents of the band and in particular their singer, songwriter, and driving force, Lee Mavers.

Then the fun began. The band chafed under Lillywhite’s studio direction, feeling that he was intentionally subverting their aggressive approach in favor of a lighter pop sound. Towards the end of the session the band – all studio greenhorns – walked out on Lillywhite, leaving him to mix and master the 12 tracks himself without their input or consent. Stranger yet, the album when released became a hit, getting almost constant rotation on college radio stations and MTV. The first single from the album, “There She Goes,” attracted almost universal critical acclaim and Mavers was compared favorably to rock lions such as Pete Townshend and Ray Davies.

A worldwide tour was organized to capitalize on the album’s success, but in the face of fame, recognition, and plaudits Lee Mavers actively disavowed the album in print.

As an early admirer of the band and an admirer of the album, I was shocked that Mavers would seemingly commit commercial suicide by badmouthing his only ticket to success. I thought to myself that Mavers either must be the most naïve megalomaniac in recent music history or an artist so sure of his vision that he would do anything to preserve it – to the point of attacking anything he felt was non-representative.

Rock & Roll Disc caught up with Lee Mavers toward the end of the La’s American tour. Passionate and articulate, Mavers left no doubt that he was a man committed to his artistic principles first and foremost. Taken out of context his comments here could be mistaken for the arrogance of his youth (he’s in his early twenties), but in context they can be seen as the opinions of a supremely confident and gifted young artist, an individual who allows no second-guessing when it comes to his music goals.

--Tom Graves

Rock & Roll Disc: How do you think the current tour’s gone over so far in the States?

Lee Mavers: Yeah, it’s o.k. now. Now that we’ve got our sound man things are looking up.

R&RD: At one time Britain’s art schools were a training ground for musicians, especially in Liverpool. Did that have anything to do with how you formed?

Mavers: No, man. Our school is the school of the universe, y’know. The universe is my university, y’dig. My school is the streets, my school is the world, the universe. I’ve got me own point of view about things, not somebody else’s.

R&RD: How did the La’s get together?

Mavers: Out of necessity. It just sort of happened and we hit on somethin’. There was nothing particularly special, y’know no fuckin’ magic thing that happened. It just happened.

R&RD: Am I right that you’ve been together four years now?

Mavers: Well, since 1986 which is close to five years now i’n it? In ’86 we just started jumpin’ up on stage and playing after other bands, y’know, shouting out for bass players out of the audience, shouting out for drummers, etc., until by that October we had the nucleus of the band. We had no place to really play, we needed the extra time to get tight and get together, y’know what I’m sayin’, to get more seasoned.

So we approached the public house and just asked ‘em if we could play for nuthin’. They let us do it, and a few weeks later we were bringing in such a big following that they started giving us, y’know, 15 pounds, 30 pounds, 60pounds. Then there was a shake-up within the band, the guitarist went, another guitarist came in, then we took Liverpool by storm, record companies came over, took us into a storm…

R&RD: The record companies started courting you when word of your following in the clubs starting getting out, right? And did your following branch out into the rest of England at this point?

Mavers: No, it was concentrated in Liverpool. Since we had no tapes or records out the following was just concentrated around there. So the record companies approached us, put us in their studio thing, and they got what they wanted out of us. But we don’t like [the album], and we’ll get our chance next.

R&RD: Did the La’s have out four singles before signing to London/Polygram?

Mavers: No, you’re talking about what happened after we signed. I have no idea how many singles they’ve put out on us at this time. Y’know we were in their studios seven times before the album came out, but we turned our backs on the nonsense we’ve been made to do, and they mixed it over without our consent, so that’s why I’m not interested in it, basically. There’ve been times when I’ve come home and me Mum’s had [the album] on and I just don’t like it.

R&RD: I’d like to ask you about this music scene in Manchester that’s been discussed…

Mavers: It’s been and gone in England. It might be coming over to America now, but belatedly so.

R&RD: Well, how would you characterize the differences you see between your music and the music of the critically successful bands from England like The Charlatans U.K. and Inspiral Carpets, and so forth?

Mavers: Ours is soul, theirs is fashion.

R&RD: Was the La’s the outgrowth of any musical movement in Liverpool?

Mavers: There are a lot of bands from up around our way but they’re all into fashion and we’ve got the soul.

R&RD: How has Liverpool’s music history, with the Beatles and the Mersey Sound, affected what you are doing?

Mavers: The Mersey Sound no, it hasn’t affected us, but the Beatles certainly had an impact on all of music. But we’re not playing their stuff either first-hand or second-hand. The Beatles wouldn’t even be in our list of Top Ten favorites.

R&RD: Yeah? Who would be some of your favorites?

Mavers: Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Captain Beefheart, early Who, stuff like that…Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald. There’s loads of other stuff, but they’re not consistent enough to be named.

R&RD: In the ‘80s acoustic music seemed to really take a backseat to electric music and only folkie die-hards seemed to play it, but that seems to be changing now. How do you feel about the acoustic parts of what you do?

Mavers: We keep getting lumped into a kind of indie, acoustic folkie thing, but no that’s not us. But all music is “folk” isn’t it? All of it is for people. We’re not folk, we just occasionally strap an acoustic guitar on, but that doesn’t make us a folk band. But look at “Substitute” by the Who. Is that folk?

R&RD: What I was getting at is that it seems acoustic music isn’t being categorized like it used to, don’t you think?

Mavers: But we are fighting being categorized, I mean we play all types of music. It’s like being categorized shouldn’t have to exist today – they keep wanting to categorize music, and they keep getting’ it wrong.

R&RD: Explain how you came up with the name the La’s. What does the name mean?

Mavers: When we formed the band we just named it the La’s, I don’t know why.

R&RD: It doesn’t have some sort of British meaning we Yanks don’t understand does it?

Mavers: I could tell you one meaning, but it would mean only the one you say, and that might be the wrong one. I mean the word “la” is a musical term – you know do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti-do. It’s also the most commonly used word in almost every language in the whole world. In Ireland and Liverpool it’s also an abbreviation for “lad,” like people here saying “alright lads” would say “alright la’.”

R&RD: What goals do you have in mind when you sit down to write a song?

Mavers: I don’t know. I just don’t know, man. If I knew what I was lookin’ for it would be found. But what I believe in is music that’s absolutely timeless; you know what is very ancient is also very futuristic and very now because now is always now.

R&RD: John Power in the La’s is quoted as saying the La’s is the only group around “making music properly.” What did he mean by that?

Mavers: The La’s are the only ones who are making music, the others are just manners and things. Keep music alive, you know. Other music is nothing but sampled beats so everything feels and sounds the same.

R&RD: Of course we’ve been reading about your dissatisfaction with producer Steve Lillywhite on the album and you mentioned it earlier. Would you care to talk some more about that?

Mavers: Well, that’s why we turned our backs on the album and just left it with them and they did that mix without our consent. I feel that the album is duller than it should be and our bad time in the studio shows. I mean parts of it are just crap.

R&RD: If we heard the La’s the way you meant for the La’s to be heard, what would we hear different?

Mavers: The La’s the way I would have wanted you to hear it. I mean, you’ll have to just hear it, I can’t speak it y’know. It’s silly that that’s the way it works, but live we are exciting. I want our records to show and feel that.

R&RD: If we saw you live would that clue us in to your real sound?

Mavers: Well, we’re still gettin’ together live if truth be told. We’ve been playin’ through somebody else’s medium for the last five years. Now we’ve got our own sound boys and we’re working on that. It’s gettin’ more like it.

R&RD: When can we expect to hear something new from you?

Mavers: Once we get back home we hope to have something ready by New Year’s Day or so.

R&RD: Who’s going to produce the next album?

Mavers: We’re going to produce it ourselves as we play. I don’t know what the fuck a producer can do, except produce bullshit from his mouth. I don’t talk to Lillywhite, but that doesn’t affect me. That pain that they’ve inflicted doesn’t affect me because I know the score and them other people don’t. On the next album we want to take the record company’s fingers out of it so that we can do it.

You know we are the talent, they are the salesmen, and that’s the way it should be. At the moment I’m just workin’ through the business because we’ve got to get over the battle.

Also, just wait until the next time, because when we’re up at bat we’re going to hit a home run. This album, though, is largely dull and unentertaining. Don’t buy the album, just give us the money.

R&RD: How do you like the video that’s out?

Mavers: I don’t like it. You’re referring to the one from ’88 that was made on a Super 8 for 50 pounds in Liverpool in half a day. Not the one that was made for thousands of dollars in L.A. The reason we had to make that was they said “if you don’t have an American to make it, we’re not going to show it.” All that bullshit.

R&RD: So are you going to do your own videos in the future as well?

Mavers: We’re going to do our own records, our own record covers, and our own videos, absolutely everything to do with the album.

R&RD: Did you like the graphics on the album cover of a close-up of a girl’s eye?

Mavers: I thought it was pathetic. What does it signify? I hate it.

R&RD: How has the record company responded to your charges? I must admit I’ve never seen anything quite like this before.

Mavers: They tell us to keep our mouths shut. Most of the time it’s John Powers gettin’ interviewed because he’s diplomatic, and I’ll tell the truth otherwise. So I’m kept down. I’m glad you wanted to speak to me. You know you’ve got to look after y’self because no one else will. We’re tired of dickheads tellin’ us what to play and how to play it. Now that they’ve used up the backlog of our recordings, the ball’s in our court and it’s our turn to bat, and they’ll only get what we give them and they’ll get it in such a way that they won’t be able to tamper with it. They’ll get it in such a way that they’ll only be able to sell it, which is the whole point of a bleedin’ record company. Y’know the art guides the artist, the artist guides the art, and the salesman sells it.

Life With the Graves

2004-10-19T13:10:00.000-07:00

Yo friends:

How is everyone doing out there in the heartland? The new and improved Graves family is doing quite well these days, thank you very much. It took me how long to get a REAL job after fumfering around as an adjunct teacher for a couple of years, cursing George Dubya the whole time? A looooooong dreadful time. Well, Bintu goes into First African Hair Braiding Salon and five minutes later walks away with a job, and she isn't even legal yet. So if any of you need your hair braided, I can get you a real sweet deal on some micro braids.

You should see Bintu braid hair. I doubt that a machine could do it faster -- she can take three tiny strands of hair and zip, zip, zip it is woven together tight and pretty. She works with about six other Africans at the salon, all from West African nations close by Senegal and Sierra Leone. They all speak French, so Bintu gets to keep her French brushed up at all times now.

She has now been here a little more than two weeks and although on one hand she is adjusting rapidly to the changes in culture, in other ways she is perplexed by America and things American. All Africans coming to America for the first time are astounded at the obesity of Americans. Her first few days here she could scarcely believe her eyes. In fact I remember well a tall, portly African in Dakar and how Bintu kept elbowing me to look at how fat he was. By our standards the guy barely made the fat grade. We just watched Supersize This, the documentary film and Bintu also could barely believe all those things about McDonalds. Believe it or not the only McDonalds she and I have eaten is the cheap ice cream cone, which is actually pretty good. And not a calorie in it.

This weekend Bintu and yours truly watched Blood Sisters I and II and (I think) a film called Velo, all Nigerian low-budget flicks. We both laughed when at the end of Blood Sister II the lead actress hangs herself (she was wicked; she deserved it) and with tongue hanging grotesquely from her face, eyes bugging out, pale makeup, she blinks. Twice. This actress, whose name I forget, was very, very good and is apparently, according to Bintu, very famous in West Africa. In the film were two children, a girl and a smaller boy, who cry on cue better than ANY kids I have seen in any film, period.

Bintu and I still have much to do, much to learn, and much to adjust to. We have had a dickens of a time finding the foods she is used to and enjoys back in Africa. Bintu apparently has highly refined tastebuds, because she can taste a speck of sugar, garlic, or salt in anything. After looking and looking for "ground nuts" to make a paste with I discovered on the internet that ground nuts are nothing more than peanuts and that the paste she was referring to is peanut butter. She used the peanut butter I had on hand for a recipe for cassava leaf, the Sierra Leone national dish made with cassava leaf, rice, smoked fish, and other things, but considered the dish ruined because the peanut butter had sugar in it. So, we had to get some peanut butter with none of the additives.

She made some okra soup the other day and it is very much like okra and seafood gumbo. The big difference is that instead of slicing the okra into round bite sized bits she grinds them very finely and adds them to the stew. The soup is thick, tasty, slimy, and smoky from the smoked fish (an African fish that cost us $10.00 a pound at a specialty African market in Whitehaven). We have decided that in the future we will buy catfish and slow smoke it in my big smoker. I figure we may save about a thousand dollars if we do that.

I cooked my famous beer can chicken for her the other day and she liked it enough that she kept sneaking bites as it was smoking outside. True flattery for a chef you know. I also prepared my famous shrimp creole for her to try out and late one night she announced, "Eeze good. My 'usband is a good cook."

In case you are wondering we aren't legal just yet. We have a few things to do first, but it will be soon. Because Uncle Sam has sort of taken the romance out of this by giving us a specific timetable, we plan on making a bigger splash with this after the fact at a ceremony where we will repeat vows and have our friends in attendance. To get a social security number or green card we must be hitched first, and as is the case with everything in this country, you gotta pay out the ass for everything. Bintu was just fingerprinted in Dakar at the U.S. Embassy, but we have to pay $70 for her to be fingerprinted again. I hope all this makes George W. feel safter at night.

The other night when cruising midtown for something to eat I decided to get a bar-b-q from Top's. When we pulled off Madison onto the side street there were about six or seven he-she's parading up and down the street, picking up men some of whom, I am told, do not get it that it is not a woman they are picking up. Bintu thought it was the funniest thing ever. In fact, I thought she was going to crack up in Top's when one of the "girls" came and stood in line. I asked her what would happen if one of them was magically transported to Dakar. She said, "the children would follow them and annoy them by saying 'it's a man! It's a man! Go jigging!'" Go jigging means the equivalent of go find yourself some sex. I'm paraphrasing.

In the past I was always henpecked because I slept more than six hours a day. I always got shit when I took naps. Never again. Africans believe strongly that a body needs rest and cannot understand at all the American insistence on little sleep. They also cannot understand the American need to cram everything possible into a single day. All that go-go-go! Those of you who know me know I have met my true soul mate.

Bintu also reported a hilarious first encounter with some of the brothers in Memphis. Three of the African girls (including Bintu) decided to go to this place called Meezes Weener's Fried Cheeken and a couple of hip brothers decided to speak to these willowy beauties. The African girls refused to acknowledge their presence at all, even when the fellows fell in behind them to talk some more. The more they were ignored the more they tried until frustration and cursing set in. Bintu said that when the girls got back to the salon they "laughed and laughed at those stupid boys."

Bintu was feeling pretty low and homesick about a week ago and her homesickness and melancholy had me panicking and suffering acute anxiety myself. But a little bit of love solved the situation and we are about as happy as two people from opposite ends of the world and opposite cultures could be. We will be adjusting probably for a long time, but we both still feel truly blessed that a miracle of circumstances could bring us together as it has. My love affair with Africa is not over by any means either. Africa will be a prominent part of our lives in one way or the other from now on. Exactly how is anyone's guess.

Well, no one has hit me on my bicycle yet (in fact, I just gave Bintu her first driving lesson -- that was an eye-opening experience for both of us) and we are still living on Cowden. Bintu has fixed the house nicely and it has evidence of her tastes here and there, such as the beautiful batik bedspreads she brought with her. She has taken over our biggest closet (remember there is hardly any closet space in a house nearly a hundred years old) and made it her own private space. It is now her walk in closet and she has it tricked out to please herself.

Bintu laughingly told me last week that the girls in the shop were saying how lucky I am to have such a beautiful woman, and of course I have to agree. She tells me that frequently in Dakar taxis or cars of girls would pull up beside her and the girls would shout out "manneque, manneque" which in French, if I am spelling it correctly, means you are a beautiful model. The shop owner, Passy from Guinea, took up for me and said, "Yah, Beentu. You are lucky as well. Tom is a good man for you to have. A 'andsome mon."

Thank you Passy. That's all for now. More to come. Let me hear from you.

Bintu Has Entered the Building!!!!!!!!!

2004-10-04T17:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends:

The big day finally arrived -- Bintu made it into this country on Friday, Oct. 1st. As you might imagine with an event with so many details to orchestrate, not everything went perfectly, but thank God she is here...happy, healthy, and beautiful. Since I last posted to my blog we had a pimple or two to overcome at the U.S. Embassy -- it seems that they wanted further proof of my job and my income, which was quickly provided, apparently to their satisfaction.

Bintu was expecting to be interrogated and flogged during her interview at the embassy and to show you how things go around and come around, the black lady who spoke very harshly to Bintu when I was in Dakar six months ago and warned me of the perils of going with a Dakarois woman is the very same woman who interviewed Bintu. She was all smiles this time and bent over backwards to accommodate and help her in the interview. No Joe Friday routine, no cat-o-nine-tails, no nothing. She just told her how happy she was that she would be going to America to be with her fiance.

Bintu went back at the appointed hour to pick up her visa and waited in a room with the other visa recipients. Someone finally came out and told them to come back the next day - more waiting. The next day the visa was ready and Bintu was supposed to go to her uncle's home to arrange for the airline ticket from Dakar to New York. He had promised to pay for her ticket. Well, uncle is in France having heart tests and is incommunicado. The aunt, in typical African fashion, knew nothing, NOTHING, of such a thing. So we were in limbo again.

I made one of those "executive" decisions. "Tom, it is either you pay for Bintu's ticket or you pay those bills that have been stacking up in the mail box." If you notice the lights off at my house for the next month or two due to lack of electricity you will know why. Also wave if you see me riding a bicycle across the bridge to teach in West Memphis.

Bintu flew from Dakar to Madrid, Spain and had at least an 8 hour layover. Then she flew to JFK in NY and had to take a shuttle bus to LaGuardia. This would be daunting even for me, but for a woman who has never been in this country before to negotiate such a hair-raising adventure as shuttling across NY in a shuttle bus and hoping to make it to her flight on time -- well, she deserves a medal at least.

Once at LGA she flew to Washington, D.C. and had to change planes again. This plane was to take her to Nashville, where I planned to pick her up at 11:00 p.m. The Nashville airport at 11:00 p.m. on a Friday night is a ghost town. There were maybe 10 people in the whole building. I waited. Waited some more. Slowly started to unravel. Other waiters informed me that the plane Bintu was on was delayed because an engine conked out. At 1:00 a.m. the plane landed and I had no idea if Bintu was on it or not. She called and quickly told me she was in New York and off she went. She tried to call again, but I have a Cricket cell phone and you of course know that Cricket's never work, especially when you are two miles outside the city limit. So, I was ready to freak completely watching person after person come off the plane.

Finally, a beautiful 6'2" vision came around the corner and damned if I would be stopped by the barriers. Envision one of those slow motion film clips and you get the idea. Overjoyed is a word that does not begin to convey the emotions we felt. Of course we were both dead tired and faced four hours of night driving to Memphis. Well, we made it, she had an extraordinary burst of adrenaline as she saw the house and I gave her the grand tour -- and we lived happily ever after.

Wave to me and don't run me over on the bicycle.

(updates to come)

Bintu Has Entered The Building!!!!!!

2004-10-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

Bintu Is Tentatively Approved for Her Visa

2004-09-24T08:43:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone:

Thought I'd let everyone know that barring any last minute weird glitch, it appears that Bintu will have her Visa in hand as of Monday. They (the Embassy interviewers) have asked for a couple of minor verifications that will be carried back on Monday, and the Visa, according to Bintu, has been pre-approved pending those documents. All this means that Bintu, after waiting for six months, will finally be coming to Memphis.

It is my hope (and hers too) that she will be here mid next week. Anytime immigration is the issue, at least a million things can go awry. But we have both been very diligent in providing the officials precisely what they request so we don't forsee major problems at this point.

If she is issued the Visa Monday we want her on the first available flight from Dakar to New York. Then I will get her booked either to Memphis or, if cheaper and quicker, Little Rock or Nashville.

We are both running on fumes right now. Sleep has been virtually impossible. Afters weeks of lethargy and almost a paralysis on my part, I have only a few days to make my yard, house, and car presentable. A tall order. Hey, anybody who doesn't have any cleaning to do this weekend -- I'll buy ya a Coke if you pitch in.

A while back I thought of arranging a greeting party for her at the airport, but we have since reconsidered. It is going to be an emotional time for us and she will be so exhausted from the flights, not to mention culture-shocked, and wired on adrenaline, that we have both thought a later meet and greet party at our house may be a much better way for everyone to meet.

So look for this to happen soon. Thanks to everyone who has lent us emotional support during this difficult journey. As ol' blue eyes said -- the best is yet to come!

TG

100 Best Nonfiction Books -- Three Lists

2004-08-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

Prof. Graves’s Idiosyncratic List of Literary Nonfiction

(now with colored comments)

Hunter S. Thompson
-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
-Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
-The Great Shark Hunt
-Hell’s Angels
**took reportage to places it had never been

Tom Wolfe
-Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby
-The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
-Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
-The Right Stuff
**the guy who both coined and embodied The New Journalism

Al Stump
-profile of Ty Cobb
**many people consider this the greatest sports profile ever written. It is.

Mikal Gilmore
-Shot in the Heart

Harry Crews
-Blood and Grits
-A Childhood
**I actually think Crews nonfiction is his best stuff. A Childhood may be the best autobiography I have ever read.

Charles Willeford
-A Guide for the Undehemorrhoided
-Something About A Soldier
**Willeford was a terrific writer of pulp crime thrillers, but these two books show a master craftsman at work.

Susan Orlean
-The Orchid Thief

Gay Talese
-Fame & Obscurity
-Honor Thy Father
-more
**Talese more or less made an ass of himself with his highly publicized book on sex. His early stuff, however, still sings.

Tom Piazza
-True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass
**I think the piece I wrote on the first Elvis impersonator, Bill Haney, may be my finest piece of nonfiction. It appeared in the same issue as this article in The Oxford American. But it wasn't my piece people talked about. It was Piazza's piece on Jimmy Martin, bluegrass pioneer and madman.

Kenneth Tynan
-Show People
**His piece on Louise Brooks has intimidated me from ever pushing forward with my own piece on her. His is a classic.

Truman Capote
-In Cold Blood
-Music for Chameleons
-various other
**work of genius.

Norman Mailer
-Armies of the Night
-The Executioner’s Song

Robert Mason
-Chickenhawk
**The best book I have read on the Vietnam experience.

Stanley Booth
-Rythm Oil
-Dance With the Devil
**some of the stories are, shall we say, apocryphal, but that doesn't stop them from being great.

Nick Tosches
-Hellfire
-Dino
-new book on opium trade
**Tosches can be very good, and he can be VERY bad. The bio of Dean Martin absolves him of many sins.

Jim Bouton
-Ball Four
**This book is about so much more than baseball. A touchstone of sorts about the American dream.

Hampton Sides
-Stomping Grounds

Robert Gordon
-It Came from Memphis

Jim Thompson
-Hardcore

Bob Greene
-Be True To Your School
-Billion Dollar Baby

Joe McGuinness
-Going To Extremes
-The Selling of the President

Joe Eszterhas
-Nark
-Charley Simpson’s Apocalypse
-American Rhapsody

A.J. Liebling
-anything

Joseph Mitchell
-The Old Hotel

Terry Southern
-Red Dirt Marijuana

James Conaway
-Memphis Afternoons

George Plimpton
-various

Joan Didion
-Slouching Towards Bethlehem
-The White Album

Michael Herr
-Dispatches

Rex Reed
-Do You Sleep In the Nude?
**Reed has fallen from the firmament and fallen hard. But some of these profiles show that this simpering former talk show mainstay had talent once upon a time.

Robert Sapolsky
-A Primate’s Memoir
**Sapolsky is a neuroscientist who has studied one troop of baboons in Kenya for over 20 years. Boy does he have stories to tell. What a gifted writer! All science writers should aspire to such literary heights.

Lucy Greely
-The Autobiography of a Face
**A haunting book about Lucy's lifetime ordeal with cancer of the jaw. Sad, wistful, and beautiful. She was a teacher of mine at Bennington. A few years ago when she learned her cancer had returned, she killed herself.

Kenneth Anger
-Hollywood Babylon I and II
Took Hollywood scandals to a bitchy, unforgettable, artistic high.

Criticism
-Reverse Angle by John Simon
-1001 Nights at the Movies by Pauline Kael
-The Castle of Indolence by Thomas M. Disch
-various by music critic Dave Marsh

Books on Writing
-The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
-The Writer's Art by James J. Kilpatrick
-Paradigms Lost by John Simon

**Rolling Stone magazine probably published more creative journalism in its early heyday than any other publication. Worth getting, but hard to find, are various anthologies the magazine put together over the years. Especially worth seeking out are the Rolling Stone articles on Bobby Fischer and Mark Spitz.

100 Best Nonfiction Books
As Chosen by The Modern Library

**These are some moldy oldies. I suppose it is good that someone has created a pantheon of great nonfiction writing, but these lean far more towards historical than literary importance, in my judgment.

1. THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS by Henry Adams*

2. THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by William James*

3. UP FROM SLAVERY by Booker T. Washington*

4. A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN by Virginia Woolf

5. SILENT SPRING by Rachel Carson

6. SELECTED ESSAYS, 1917-1932 by T. S. Eliot

7. THE DOUBLE HELIX by James D. Watson

8. SPEAK, MEMORY by Vladimir Nabokov

9. THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE by H. L. Mencken

10. THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY by John Maynard Keynes

11. THE LIVES OF A CELL by Lewis Thomas

12. THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY by Frederick Jackson Turner

13. BLACK BOY by Richard Wright
**I agree with this one.

14. ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL by E. M. Forster

15. THE CIVIL WAR by Shelby Foote*
**Local boy makes good. It doesn't hurt that he also happens to be on the Modern Library selection committee.

16. THE GUNS OF AUGUST by Barbara Tuchman

17. THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND by Isaiah Berlin

18. THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN by Reinhold Niebuhr

19. NOTES OF A NATIVE SON by James Baldwin
**Baldwin was a terrific essayist. He deserves deeper reading than the obligatory gestures in college lit. classes.

20. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein*
**Brownies anyone?

21. THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE by William Strunk and E. B. White

22. AN AMERICAN DILEMMA by Gunnar Myrdal

23. PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell

24. THE MISMEASURE OF MAN by Stephen Jay Gould

25. THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP by Meyer Howard Abrams

26. THE ART OF THE SOLUBLE by Peter B. Medawar

27. THE ANTS by Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson

28. A THEORY OF JUSTICE by John Rawls

29. ART AND ILLUSION by Ernest H. Gombrich

30. THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS by E. P. Thompson

31. THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK by W.E.B. Du Bois*

32. PRINCIPIA ETHICA by G. E. Moore

33. PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION by John Dewey

34. ON GROWTH AND FORM by D'Arcy Thompson*

35. IDEAS AND OPINIONS by Albert Einstein*

36. THE AGE OF JACKSON, Arthur Schlesinger by Jr.

37. THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes

38. BLACK LAMB and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West

39. AUTOBIOGRAPHIES by W. B. Yeats

40. SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN CHINA by Joseph Needham

41. GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Robert Graves

42. HOMAGE TO CATALONIA by George Orwell

43. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN by Mark Twain
**Seems to me there ought to be more Twain here.

44. CHILDREN OF CRISIS by Robert Coles

45. A STUDY OF HISTORY by Arnold J. Toynbee

46. THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY by John Kenneth Galbraith

47. PRESENT AT THE CREATION by Dean Acheson

48. THE GREAT BRIDGE by David McCullough

49. PATRIOTIC GORE by Edmund Wilson

50. SAMUEL JOHNSON by Walter Jackson Bate

51. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
**A great, important book, but highly credible biographers dispute much of the mythmaking here.

52. THE RIGHT STUFF by Tom Wolfe

53. EMINENT VICTORIANS by Lytton Strachey*

54. WORKING by Studs Terkel

55. DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Styron

56. THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION by Lionel Trilling

57. THE SECOND WORLD WAR by Winston Churchill

58. OUT OF AFRICA by Isak Dinesen*

59. JEFFERSON AND HIS TIME by Dumas Malone

60. IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN by William Carlos Williams

61. CADILLAC DESERT by Marc Reisner

62. THE HOUSE OF MORGAN by Ron Chernow

63. THE SWEET SCIENCE by A. J. Liebling
**The classic on boxing.

64. THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES by Karl Popper

65. THE ART OF MEMORY by Frances A. Yates

66. RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM by R. H. Tawney

67. A PREFACE TO MORALS by Walter Lippmann

68. THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE by Jonathan D. Spence

69. THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS by Thomas S. Kuhn

70. THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW by C. Vann Woodward

71. THE RISE OF THE WEST by William H. McNeill

72. THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS by Elaine Pagels

73. JAMES JOYCE by Richard Ellmann

74. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE by Cecil Woodham-Smith

75. THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell

76. THE CITY IN HISTORY by Lewis Mumford

77. BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM by James M. McPherson

78. WHY WE CAN'T WAIT by Martin Luther King by Jr.

79. THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT by Edmund Morris

80. STUDIES IN ICONOLOGY by Erwin Panofsky

81. THE FACE OF BATTLE by John Keegan

82. THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND by George Dangerfield

83. VERMEER by Lawrence Gowing

84. A BRIGHT SHINING LIE by Neil Sheehan

85. WEST WITH THE NIGHT by Beryl Markham

86. THIS BOY'S LIFE by Tobias Wolff
**This book, like The Duke of Deception by his brother Geoffrey Wolff, is wildly overrated. A good, proficient journeyman book, but not one of the top 100 nonfiction books of the English language.

87. A MATHEMATICIAN'S APOLOGY by G. H. Hardy

88. SIX EASY PIECES by Richard P. Feynman

89. PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK by Annie Dillard

90. THE GOLDEN BOUGH by James George Frazer

91. SHADOW AND ACT by Ralph Ellison

92. THE POWER BROKER by Robert A. Caro

93. THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION by Richard Hofstadter

94. THE CONTOURS OF AMERICAN HISTORY by William Appleman Williams

95. THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE by Herbert Croly

96. IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote*

97. THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER by Janet Malcolm

98. THE TAMING OF CHANCE by Ian Hacking

99. OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS by Anne Lamott

100. MELBOURNE by Lord David Cecil

100 Best Nonfiction Books
As Chosen by The Modern Library's Reader Poll

1. THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS by AYN RAND
**Ballot stuffing, pure and simple.

2. DIANETICS:THE MODERN SCIENCE OF MENTAL HEALTH by L. RON HUBBARD
**How much money did it cost the Scientologists for this?

3. OBJECTIVISM: THE PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND by LEONARD PEIKOFF

4. 101 THINGS TO DO TIL THE REVOLUTION by CLAIRE WOLFE

5. THE GOD OF THE MACHINE by ISABEL PATERSON

6. AYN RAND: A SENSE OF LIFE by MICHAEL PAXTON

7. THE ULTIMATE RESOURCE by JULIAN SIMON

8. ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON by HENRY HAZLITT

9. SEND IN THE WACO KILLERS by VIN SUPRYNOWICZ

10. MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME by JOHN R. LOTT

11. PSYCHIATRY: THE ULTIMATE BETRAYAL by BRUCE WISEMAN

12. FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS by G. HANCOCK

13. CLASSICAL INDIVIDUALISM: THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF EACH HUMAN BEING by TIBOR MACHAN

14. FREE TO CHOOSE by MILTON AND ROSE FRIEDMAN

15. AIN'T NOBODY'S BUSINESS IF YOU DO by PETER MCWILLIAMS

16. THE ROAD TO SERFDOM by F. A. HAYEK

17. FREEDOM IN CHAINS by JAMES BOVARD

18. AMERICA'S GREAT DEPRESSION by MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

19. THE ROOSEVELT MYTH by JOHN T. FLYNN

20. THE TRUE BELIEVER by ERIC HOFFER

21. VINDICATING THE FOUNDERS by THOMAS WEST

22. THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE by CARL L. BECKER

23. COGNITIVE THERAPY AND THE EMOTIONAL DISORDERS by AARON T. BECK

24. DEATH BY GOVERNMENT by R. J. RUMMEL

25. A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN by VIRGINIA WOOLF

26. LONGITUDE by DAVA SOBEL

27. ORDINARILY SACRED by LYNDA SEXSON

28. SPEAK, MEMORY by VLADIMIR NABOKOV

29. THE ART OF MEMORY by FRANCES YATES

30. DUMBING US DOWN by JOHN TAYLOR GATTO

31. THE GOLDEN BOUGH by JAMES FRAZER

32. UNDAUNTED COURAGE: MERIWETHER LEWIS, THOMAS JEFFERSON, AND THE OPENING OF THE AMERICAN WEST by STEPHEN E. AMBROSE

33. A MODERN PROPHET by HAROLD KLEMP

34. THE FLUTE OF GOD by PAUL TWITCHELL

35. REAL PRESENCES by GEORGE STEINER

36. OUT OF AFRICA by ISAK DINESEN

37. WAYS OF SEEING by JOHN BERGER

38. THE SHADOW UNIVERSITY: THE BETRAYAL OF LIBERTY ON AMERICA'S CAMPUSES by ALAN CHARLES KORS

39. PROPERTY MATTERS: HOW PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE UNDER ASSAULT AND WHY YOU SHOULD CARE by JAMES V. DE LONG

40. STORMING HEAVEN by JAY STEVENS

41. THE TEXAN by C. S. BARRIOS

42. HOMAGE TO CATALONIA by GEORGE ORWELL

43. THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by WILLIAM JAMES

44. HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICS by DARRELL HUFF

45. BUT IS IT TRUE? by AARON WILDAVSKY

46. A MATHEMATICIAN READS THE NEWSPAPER by JOHN ALLEN PAULOS

47. ANATOMY OF CRITICISM by NORTHROP FRYE

48. THE MAINSPRING OF HUMAN PROGRESS by HENRY GRADY WEAVER

49. MODERN TIMES by PAUL JOHNSON

50. MEN TO MATCH MY MOUNTAINS by IRVING STONE

51. THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS by HENRY ADAMS

52. THE GREAT BRIDGE by DAVID MCCULLOUGH

53. AMERICAN GAY by STEPHEN O. MURRAY

54. THE DOUBLE HELIX by JAMES D. WATSON

55. THE SENSE OF AN ENDING by FRANK KERMODE

56. THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS by ELAINE PAGELS

57. EROS THE BITTERSWEET by ANNE CARSON

58. THE WESTERN CANON by HAROLD BLOOM

59. THE WHITE GODDESS by ROBERT GRAVES

60. HEALING OUR WORLD by MARY RUWART

61. SILENT SPRING by RACHEL CARSON

62. PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK by ANNIE DILLARD

63. SEXUAL PERSONAE by CAMILLE PAGLIA
**I enjoy tinkering around with her ideas, but as a writer Paglia frequently simply bores.

64. THINK AND GROW RICH by NAPOLEON HILL

65. A LIFE OF ONE'S OWN by DAVID KELLEY

66. DOORS OF PERCEPTION by ALDOUS HUXLEY

67. THE DISCOVERY OF FREEDOM by ROSE WILDER LANE

68. MORE LIBERTY MEANS LESS GOVERNMENT by WALTER WILLIAMS

69. LIBERTARIANISM: A PRIMER by DAVID BOAZ

70. BEYOND LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE by WILLIAM MADDOX AND STUART LILIE

71. A CONFLICT OF VISIONS: IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF POLITICAL STRUGGLES by THOMAS SOWELL

72. PARLIAMENT OF WHORES by P. J. O'ROURKE

73. SEPARATING SCHOOL AND STATE: HOW TO LIBERATE AMERICA'S FAMILIES by SHELDON RICHMAN

74. THE FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES by VIRGINIA POSTREL

75. THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE by WILLIAM STRUNK AND E. B. WHITE

76. ORIENTALISM by EDWARD SAID

77. ECOTERROR by RON ARNOLD

78. WHY GOVERNMENT DOESN'T WORK by HARRY BROWNE

79. OUT OF THE CRISIS by W. EDWARDS DEMING

80. NOT OUT OF AFRICA by MARY LEFKOWITZ

81. THE END OF RACISM by DINESH D'SOUZA

82. BEHIND THE MASK by IAN BURUMA

83. IN A DARK WOOD by ALSTON CHASE

84. PRIVATE PARTS by HOWARD STERN
**I confess, I read this. And it's not bad. The movie, however, is downright good.

85. THE TELEPHONE BOOK by AVITAL RONELL

86. THE MINUTEMAN: RESTORING AN ARMY OF THE PEOPLE by GARY HART

87. WAKING AND DREAMING by JOSEPH HART

88. THE GREATEST STORY NEVER TOLD by LANA CANTRELL

89. RADICAL SON by DAVID HOROWITZ
**This goofball!!!!??????

90. UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN by SUSAN SONTAG
**Sominex between two covers.

91. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X by ALEX HALEY AND MALCOLM X

92. A FEELING FOR BOOKS by JANICE RADWAY

93. THE HERO OF A THOUSAND FACES by JOSEPH CAMPBELL

94. THE JOB by WILLIAM BURROUGHS
**I am shocked this made it. I have the book, like it, but Burroughs is such an outrageously out there thinker, that this will only appeal to lunatics like me.

95. SILENT INTERVIEWS by SAMUEL R. DELANY

96. SLATS GROBNIK AND SOME OTHER FRIENDS by MIKE ROYKO
**Read this and understand why he had such a devoted following.

97. RISE OF THE UNMELTABLE ETHNICS by MICHAEL NOVACK

98. REVERSE ANGLE by JOHN SIMON
**How did this make it? I thought I was the only person who admitted liking John Simon.

99. PLACING MOVIES by JONATHON ROSENBAUM

100. RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING by PATRICK J BUCHANAN
**Read it. Liked it. Like him. Disagree violently with much of his social agenda. He hit a new low in trying to discredit the war record of John Kerry. Newsflash for Pat: He served, you didn't. Shut up.

Tom Graves' Reviews from Rock & Roll Disc 06/'91

2004-08-16T14:19:00.000-07:00

The La’s
The La’s Go! London 828 202-2

From Rock & Roll Disc magazine June, 1991

Right out of the box The La’s had me hooked like a red snapper. All my complaints of yore about the bored soul at the heart of so much of today’s college/alternative scene evaporated when the disc’s first track “Son of a Gun” came ringing out of my speakers like it had every right to be there. Imagine, if you will, the pop songcraft and catchiness of an early Bang period Neil Diamond grafted onto the swagger and spit of the Clash’s Combat Rock – that’s The La’s in a nutshell. Track after track, cut after cut, I sat in mute disbelief at the polish, talent, and songwriting smarts I was hearing from this heretofore unknown Liverpool group.

But is there real musical substance beneath the gloss, the jangles, the hooks, and Steve Lillywhite’s surehanded production? Let me put it this way: “Way Out” matches nearly any Who acoustic number bar for bar, “Freedom Song” is as good as any Muswell Hillbillies-era Kinks song, and the lyrics sink a pipeline of mental images into your head. Now you tell me, does that sound like a band worth hearing?

The La’s isn’t perfect – what album really is? “There She Goes,” the college chart hit pulled for the video now on rotation on MTV, while a choice song, isn’t the best track here. And the 7:52 “Looking Glass” meanders. But when every other song is short, in sharp focus, and tempered as true as tungsten steel, how can I fault them?

It’s impossible to predict success (for all I know The La’s may suck live), but if this were the Kentucky Derby, I know where I’d place my bet. In short, The La’s is the best album R.E.M. will never make.

--Tom Graves

Wishbone Ash
Argus

From Rock & Roll Disc magazine June, 1991

Ever wonder who the real model was for Spinal Tap? Wonder no more.

--Tom Graves

The Five Americans
Western Union

Sundazed SC 11004

From Rock & Roll Disc magazine June, 1991

The band that did “Western Union, nah-nah-nah-nah-nah,” is actually pretty good-ga-good-ga-good.

--Tom Graves

Tom' Reviews from November 1989 Rock & Roll Disc

2004-08-15T15:40:00.000-07:00

The Sugarcubes
Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week!

from Rock & Roll Disc magazine November, 1989

Elektra 960 860-2
Producers: The Sugarcubes and
Derek Birkett
Engineers: Various
Total disc time: 51:46
(no SPARS code listed)

Merit: *1/2
Sound: ***

It is the job of the P.R. people at record companies to shove this week's newest big thing down the throats of a hungry music-buying public. Like seasoned carnival barkers, the pros are expert at tapping into youthful fads and exploiting them to the last dime. The British and European rock press is never sated with these Johnny-come-latelys; they grind out rock idols like smokers grind out cigarettes.

As a critic I've become nearly immune to the wheedling and siren calls visited upon me by the mountains of promotional material I receive each week. But as callous as I've become, I still keep my ear to the ground for something truly new and original. I heard about the Sugarcubes long before their domestic debut on Elektra, when their singles were available only on import. The grapevine was overflowing with praise for this innovative collective from, of all places, Iceland.

Life's Too Good, their first disc, very nearly lived up to its reputation with the most stunningly feral and imaginative singing in recent rock history from lead singer Bjork. The first song on the disc, "Traitor," opens with an avalanche of chords and drums over Bjork's eerie, ethereal chanting. The very next track, "Motorcrash," boasts the most impassioned, foreboding vocals I have heard in ages, and Bjork's emotional range throughout the disc is not to be believed.

But even on this most auspicious of debuts, there were signs of trouble. Einar Orn, billed as the other lead singer, is really more a provocateur and thorn in the band's side than a contributor; truth is he couldn't carry a tune in a U-Haul and his aggressive and senseless interruptions on-stage turned off so many concert-goers in New York last year that the art crowd that was so eager to embrace the Sugarcubes dropped them like a hot spud. Now the Sugarcubes couldn't get arrested if they went "wilding" in Saks Fifth Avenue.

With Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week! one finds only the faintest traces of their early promise. There is not one distinguishable melody on the disc and Bjork's seductive and enthralling singing has now become excessively melismatic and overbearing. She swoops down on every syllable as if it were her last utterance, and puts lyrics through a bootcamp's worth of vocal calisthenics. Einar Orn's indefensible rantings simply have got to go. Mark my words; if he stays this band will perish. Even the most ardent Europhile can only take so much of a steady irritant, and the Sugarcubes have fallen prey to their own art-rock conceits (they performed at several concerts in the U.S. using only their native tongue, even when they all speak and sing in fluent English!). Like so many others before them, they need to learn you have to make good music before aspiring to make great art.

Can the Sugarcubes survive this anchorless dreck? I doubt it. We may see a few more albums, but since inertia is an irresistible force of nature, I wouldn't be surprised if Bjork (who remains one of the most sexually alluring creatures in the universe despite her altogether ordinary looks) eventually goes it alone. Out of the frozen desolation of her homeland, she is that rarest of orchids, flowering against a backdrop of icy nothingness. She, like a bloom in the tundra, is too precious a thing not to cherish.

--Tom Graves

The Essentials
The Essentials

from Rock & Roll Disc magazine November, 1989

Refrigerator TE2300
Total disc time: 44:34 (no SPARS code listed)

Merit: *
Sound: **

Non-essential.

-Tom Graves

Chet Baker
Sings and Plays From the Film
"Let's Get Lost"

From Rock & Roll Disc magazine November, 1989

Novus 3054-2-N
Total disc time: 63:14
(no SPARS code listed)
Merit: ****
Sound: ****

I am no jazz critic, and there are several Rock & Roll Disc writers far more qualified to write about Chet Baker than I. But after reading the accompanying press kit, I could not resist exploring this disc. Baker, one of the most atmospheric and haunting of jazz trumpet players, lived life in the fastest jet-set lane during his heyday in the 50's. He was handsome and roguish, and bore more than a little resemblance to James Dean. He died only a few years ago from drug-related causes -- he had been a heroin addict for nearly three decades and it had left him dissipated and old beyond his years. This disc is from Bruce Weber's documentary film on Baker's final days, when he was still active on the jazz scene. Baker's sorrowful, disquieting vocals are the real substance of the disc, and more melancholy music I have never heard.

This is a disc I will save for private moments of introspection and despair. Because after hearing this, nothing else could ever quite fit those moods.

--Tom Graves

Various Artists
Toga Rock II
from Rock & Roll Disc magazine November, 1989

DCC Compact Classics DZS-043
Total disc time: 38:20 (no SPARS code listed)

Merit: ***
Sound: ***

If you have read this magazine[Rock & Roll Disc] for any length of time, you should know the work of Steve Hoffman, the remastering wunderkind who now works for DCC Compact Classics. His remastering expertise is unimpeachable, and the first installment of Toga Rock (DCC DZS029) was one of the few compilation CDs that made it to our 100 Best Of issue. But with Toga Rock II I can only surmise that Hoffman was in the mood to experiment. His versions of "Shout" by the Isley Brothers and "Gloria" by Them have a grating high end that had me checking my stereo for a problem. I compared these versions to the Isley's Bear Family release (which was warmer and truer to the original) and Them's Polygram release (which was far truer to the original single) and was left wondering what got into Hoffman. He has never mixed drums this hot before or tried to "update" his sound to be more contemporary (a charge that has recently been leveled at Rhino's Bill Inglot). His uncompromising standards are what have made him a household name among CD addicts.

Stranger still is a version of the Strangeloves' "I Want Candy" that was taken off a record (the liner notes tell us the master tapes no longer exist) that sounds like it was rubbed on a sidewalk. I mean, like, why? Rare Earth's"'Get Ready" was remixed without the silly audience noises, but without them the song drags without relief.

Even with these complaints, which are a rarity with Hoffman, there are still rubies and emeralds scattered throughout. Sly Stone's "Dance To the Music" is simply stunning, with a huge stereo separation and pinpoint imaging. The Rivingtons' "Papa-Omm-Mow-Mow" likewise makes you want to salute. A high point for me is the obscure Gary Glitter song, "Rock & Roll," which I have been trying to find for nearly two decades. A sinister heavy metal riff reverberates over tribal drumming as big as all outdoors. It's one of those songs you can't shake once you've heard it.

Although I'm still puzzled by the erratic nature of this disc it remains a must for those into collecting the choicest remasterings.
--Tom Graves

Aerosmith
Pump
Geffen 9 24254-2
from Rock & Roll Disc magazine November 1989

If any critic ever cut Aerosmith slack during their halcyon days in the 70's, I never saw evidence of it. Steven Tyler seemed no more than an artificially induced Mick Jagger, a distorted mirror's image with poutier, gravity-deflected lips and an even more cartoonish stage appearance. The whole group was deemed low-brow and sleazy and they went unnoticed and unloved by all except the millions of fans who knew a good riff when they heard one.

I met up with Robert Palmer, the esteemed New York Times music critic, recently and one of the many things we talked about was Aerosmith. "I thought their stuff was absolute junk at the time," he admitted, "but they were a major influence on practically everything decent that's coming out today." We agreed that Aerosmith was a band in clear need of re-evaluation, especially after their benchmark collaboration with Run-D.M.C. on "Walk This Way," which was not only the most successful melding of disparate idioms we have seen in recent times, it was one of the best (maybe even the best) rock videos ever made.

Aerosmith has had some severe ups and downs over the two decades it has been in business, but Pump, their newest disc, sounds like a band fresh out of the starting gate. Pump rolls in like a thunderhead with a viciousness that hasn't been matched by other veteran rockers as far back as I care to remember. Every song on the disc is cut from the same hard rock cloth; don't expect slow-building ballads like "Dream On" here. "F.I.N.E.," "Love In An Elevator," and "Janie's Got A Gun," (the lyrics of which I could not penetrate even if I had a decoder ring) are played for maximum body contact; to hear them is to feel them. Listening to Joe Perry's hypersonic finger slashings on "Janie's Got A Gun" I got that rarest of rock critic afflictions -- the itch to strap on that Les Paul Air Model Deluxe and take the motherfucker over.

I'm too old to have grown up drooling over Aerosmith -- but hell, I can always learn.

--Tom Graves

The J. Geils Band
The J. Geils Band

From Rock & Roll Disc magazine November, 1989

Edsel EDCD 300 (British import)

While I don't think there is a single instance of great, enduring songwriting on this disc -- don't look for any Hall of Fame nominations here -- The J. Geils Band is still a fine example of aggregate groovemaking.

Put in the context of 1971, when the album debuted, it's easy to understand how it was overlooked. The early 70's was the tail end of the great blues revival that had begun in the mid-60's with such groundbreaking bands as the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Rolling Stones, and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers (not to mention the revived careers of blues stalwarts such as B.B. King, Albert King, and John Lee Hooker) and ended with the lasting contributions of the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the early Z.Z. Top. Blues, great blues was everywhere, and if it didn't knock your feet out from under you, then it seldom got noticed.

The J. Geils Band, with its understated guitar work and frequently slow, percolating rhythms was a far cry from the fried and frenzied wallop of AC/DC's early boogie outings. But this disc has a way of throwing a little dancing fever on you with fetching covers such as Albert Collins' "Sno-Cone"
and the smoldering "Serves You Right To Suffer."

The soul music side of the band shines here as well with fine soul-strutting by Peter Wolf on "First I Look At the Purse" and "On Borrowed Time."

Harp player Magic Dick was a rare commodity for a white blues band, and Muddy Waters himself paid the youngster the highest tribute by saying if he could perform oral sex like he played harp, well, he would be one son of a gun (I'm paraphrasing).

The songwriting talent soon enough emerged and blossomed in the J. Geils Band and they later directed their energies to more pop-flavored material. While someone looking for the pyrotechnics of Cream or Ten Years After will surely be disappointed by the more modest approach taken here, those who can appreciate hard-hitting straight doses of blues without frills and some excellent ensemble playing to boot will undoubtedly be pleased by this early effort.

It's too bad that potentially great blues artists such as Albert Collins and the Kinsey Report can't put aside their string squeezing long enough to take a cue from the J. Geils Band: the groove is the most important thing. Too much flash can become a flash in the pan.

--Tom Graves

Full Interview -- Rolling Stone Mick Taylor

2004-08-10T14:31:00.000-07:00

Stone Alone

A Rare Interview with Mick Taylor by Tom Graves

originally published in Rock & Roll Disc magazine July, 1989

Mick Taylor initially came into the public spotlight as the very young (17 years old) replacement for the renowned Peter Green in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Although his early work reflected a preoccupation with the blues guitar style set forth by Eric Clapton during his legendary tenure with the Bluesbreakers, Taylor quickly matured into one of the most melodic, articulate, and technically accurate of players. He rapidly gained recognition for his fluid soloing, but became equally celebrated for his brilliant slide guitar style. Taylor did not become known to the mass rock audience, however, until 1969 when the Rolling Stones sent shock waves through their corps of fans by announcing Brian Jones' departure and replacement by the relatively unknown Mick Taylor. Only weeks later Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool and the Stones began a tour of America that ended in the murder and chaos of Altamont. In addition to Let It Bleed and Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out, Taylor was a crucial musical cog in the Stones' most influential middle-period albums, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street. He recorded two other albums with the Stones and unexpectedly called it quits, seemingly going into hiding. In 1979 he resurfaced with a self-titled solo album which sold poorly but was well-received by fans and critics. Reportedly sidelined by debilitating drug habits, he nevertheless toured and recorded with Bob Dylan, among others.

Mick Taylor is currently working with a new band that includes Jeff Beck alumnus Max Middleton, and a record deal with a major label is said to be forthcoming. According to several sources, including Taylor himself, he has kicked his drug habits and is playing better than ever.
Taylor has rarely granted interviews since leaving the Stones, certainly none that were in-depth. A naturally quiet and reflective man, Taylor was not the ideal interview since he rarely opened up at length. If one reads his carefully weighed answers closely, however, they frequently speak volumes.

R&RD: Did you have a musical upbringing? Were either of your parents gifted with an instrument?

Taylor: My mother had a younger brother who used to play guitar. That was kind of my inspiration and my starting point on the guitar, but my whole family liked music. I won't say they were overtly musical -- they didn't play instruments or anything other than my mother who played a bit of piano -- but I grew up in a house listening to music all the time.

R&RD: Were you too young to have been a part of the first wave of rock and roll in England, when Elvis, Bill Haley, and Buddy Holly had all become tremendously popular and influential?

Taylor: Well I suppose I would have been too young if my parents had not bought those records. They even took me to my first rock and roll concert when I was nine years old. They took me to see Bill Haley and the Comets in 1958, I think it was.

R&RD: When do you recall becoming seriously interested in music yourself?

Taylor: Well, when I started making a bit of progress on the guitar. I got together with some school friends and formed a band, which was when I was 13 or 14 years old.

R&RD: Would this have been during the time of the British Invasion?

Taylor: Yes, the Beatles were then becoming famous in England and all over the world.

R&RD: At this early age were you yet aware of the Rolling Stones?

Taylor: Oh yeah, of course. They were certainly an influence on me in the sense they were playing rhythm and blues as was John Mayall's Bluesbreakers who I listened to a little later on. I kind of got to discover American rhythm and blues -- black music -- and started listening to that when I was a teenager. That's when I started taking the guitar more seriously.

R&RD: What was your first guitar?

Taylor: It was called a Hofner President. It was like a semi-acoustic single cutaway with two pickups. I can't remember what kind of amp I started on.

R&RD: When you began to play the guitar was it rock and roll or rhythm and blues that first interested you?

Taylor: I was aware of and roll before I was aware of blues, but by the time I became aware of blues I was playing guitar so I became more interested in rhythm and blues.

R&RD: In reading about you I'm always struck by your youth when you got involved with John Mayall or for that matter the Rolling Stones. You were playing blues in your very early teens and that surprises me, because it was my impression that blues appealed to the older more collegiate musical sophisticate.

Taylor: No it wasn’t like that at all. I suppose it would seem that way, but it was people who were 15 and 16 years old. Certainly there were people older than myself, but I'm not the only one of that era who was aware of rhythm and blues music.

R&RD: Were you more influenced by the original American rhythm and blues or by the blues scene that was beginning to happen in England?

Taylor: I became aware of it all at the same time really. It was impossible to listen to the Rolling Stones playing Chuck Berry and not realize they were playing American rhythm and blues music, so one naturally wanted to hear the original, the real thing.

R&RD: Who were the blues players who most interested you?

Taylor: I used to listen to a lot of the Chicago blues artists such as Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, and Muddy Waters, a guy called Jimmie Rogers. One of the first blues albums I remember buying was a record called Live At the Regal by B.B. King. That had a big influence on me.

R&KD: What knocked you out the most about him, his singing or guitar playing?

Taylor: Both, but especially his guitar playing at that time.

R&RD: Did you listen to Albert King or Freddie King much at this time?

Taylor: Yes I was aware of both of those guys, or at least I was by the time I joined John Mayall because we used to play a lot of their songs in our show – we used to play "Oh, Pretty Woman" and "Crosscut Saw" and we did some Freddie King instrumentals. Those records were difficult to find in London, though. There were only a couple of places where you could buy rhythm and blues imports, so I found out where the shops were in London and I used to go there and buy them. They weren't widely available. You had to be quite dedicated and quite keen on that music to seek out those record shops where they stocked American imports.

R&RD: Did you order many direct from Chess records in the States like Mick Jagger did?

Taylor: No I just used to buy them at those specialty shops.

R&RD: When the music scene began to happen in earnest in England who did you first hear that made you decide then and there to get in a band? Taylor: I suppose something that was really interesting – apart from the Beatles, who I always liked and loved their music – would be Eric Clapton, who was the best blues guitar player around at the time that I had ever seen.

R&RD: Your first record was Blues Crusade with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers...

Taylor: Yes it was.

R&RD: Many critics believe that your playing at this time was very heavily influenced by Eric Clapton, that your guitar sound was patterned almost identically after his, and in a sense was derivative...

Taylor: But it was derivative. I had just turned 17 years old and hadn't been playing that long, so my blues playing at that time was very derivative. I was still very much a beginner. I wouldn't say I was more influenced by Eric Clapton than anybody else though, than any of the other blues guitarists that I had listened to, but it certainly was derivative. It took me four years of being on the road with John Mayall to really develop my own style.

R&RD: Of course you are celebrated now as much for your slide guitar as your lead guitar playing. Wasn’t this something of an extreme rarity in England in the early 60's?

Taylor: There weren't too many people who played slide guitar, no.

R&RD: How did you learn slide guitar? Was it from listening to Brian Jones in the Stones?

Taylor: No, he wasn’t really an influence though he played a bit of slide as did Keith Richards. I suppose the first slide guitar playing I heard was Muddy Waters.

R&RD: But slide guitar is considered to be such a difficult style, and it wasn't until you and Duane Allman popularized it that you saw that many people play it. Wasn't it difficult to pick up all the slide techniques on your own?

Taylor: Not necessarily. Not if you were brought up in a musical environment and you liked rhythm and blues and you knew lots of other musicians, then it doesnt seem so strange. But I know what you mean, because like I said before, that music wasn't widely accessible in England. So you had to really know a bit about it and know where to find the records...

R&RD: Who were some of these other musicians?

Taylor: Well there was Eric Clapton, there was Jeff Beck, there was myself, there were lots of other people really who played blues.

R&RD: But they weren't really known for slide playing then were they?

Taylor: Not then they weren't, no. Eric Clapton does now.

R&RD: You didn't play slide guitar on Blues Crusade at all. Was this because Mayall, who hyped his own slide playing, was considered the slide player of the group?

Taylor: No I dont think so. I think it was just the choice of material.

R&RD: Have you ever stopped to think that of all the guitar players around only you and Duane Allman and perhaps Johnny Winter are considered to have been equally articulate as slide players and as lead players?

Taylor: What about Ry Cooder?

R&RD: Yes, but his favor among critics and guitarists is weighted more towards him as a slide guitarist than a lead guitarist.

Taylor: Yeah, that's true. You're right. But no I really haven't thought much about that. I know I don't consider myself a sort of specialist slide player or anything. I have done a few sessions lately where I've played slide guitar, but I've played lead as well.

R&RD: When Eric Clapton was in the Bluesbreakers, he seems to have been celebrated throughout England. There was the "Clapton Is God" graffito and so on. Was he that highly regarded?

Taylor: Amongst musicians, yes he was. He was the best blues gultarist around.

R&RD: When did it dawn on you that you had those same kinds of virtuoso abilities?

Taylor: I suppose when I joined John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, or maybe even before that.

R&RD: Your schoolmates in your first band must have held you in awe.

Taylor: Wen no, all of them went on to become professional musicians themselves. There was a bass player who used to play with Jethro Tull named John Glascock, who died a few years ago, and his brother, the drummer, and he now lives and plays in Los Angeles. I think the other guitar player in this group went on into the music business for awhile too.

R&RD: How did you become a member of Mayall's Bluesbreakers?

Taylor: I was chosen as the result of a phone call. He called me up and said he needed a guitar player and that was because, a couple of years before that, I had been to see a show he was doing in a community center in a college type place in Wentgarden City which is near Hatfield. Eric Clapton didn't show up for the gig and I went backstage during the interval and asked if I could sit in with them and he said yes. He must have been quite impressed because he took my number and got in touch with me a couple of years later when Peter Green left.

R&RD: What was it like standing in for Clapton that first time?

Taylor: It was great! I knew most of the songs by heart...

R&RD: John Mayall was obviously the coach for three of the most important blues players to come out of England. You replaced Peter Green, who had become something of a legend in his own right, and he had a very different blues approach from you and Clapton. How would you characterize the differences in the styles of you, Clapton, and Green?

Taylor: I don’t think they are that different actually. I think there are more similarities than differences.

R&RD: Was Peter Green as big an influence on you as Clapton?

Taylor: I never knew Peter Green at all. He was very highly regarded of course, but he wasn’t really an influence on me, because as I said before we all listened to the same music. We all were influenced together at around the same time by the source of that music rather than each other. The only new guitar player who came along that really influenced everybody and influenced me too was Jimi Hendrix.

R&RD: What about Jeff Beck? He was doing many of the innovations most people credit to Hendrix before anyone.

Taylor: Yes that’s true. He’s always been one of my favorite guitar players.

R&RD: Describe what it was like working on your first album, Blues Crusade? Taylor: It was great and we did it all in seven hours! The whole record. It was like playing on stage – we just set the equipment up in the studio and it was “one-two-three-four here we go.” There were hardly any breaks between the numbers and, like I said, it was all recorded and mixed in seven hours.
R&RD: Why can’t they do it like that any more? Some groups now spend a year in the studio.

Taylor: I know. It would be much more simple wouldn’t it?

R&RD: In spite of the rush the engineering on those Bluesbreakers albums seems to be quite good.

Taylor: It had to be because everything was done so quickly. There wasn’t really any room for any mistakes. You just set up and the engineers got set up and they got good sound and you just did it.

R&RD: When you first went on the road with Mayall you were still at a very tender age. You were thrust into a spotlight few could handle following Clapton and Peter Green. How were you received by your audience at first.

Taylor: Not too big to start with. I was probably considered to be too young and not quite good enough. But that soon changed in a couple of years, especially when we started touring America.

R&RD: What kind of following did Mayall have in America at the time? Taylor: It was pretty much in England to start with, but we started to do some pretty big shows with people like Jimi Hendrix and Albert King, and we played at the Fillmore East and Fillmore West, we played everywhere really. We did very long tours. It was the beginning of John Mayall building up a big following in America too. A lot of people [in America] had heard of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers because I think by the time we toured America Cream was around as well, and people knew about Eric Clapton playing with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.

R&RD: Bare Wires, your second album, marked quite a departure for the Bluesbreakers. We find your playing maturing quite a bit, you are playing slide here for the first time, and Mayall has changed the sound by adding a horn section…

Taylor: Yes, there was more of a rhythm and blues jazz influence on that one. He, like the rest of us, listened to jazz too, and he wanted to incorporate some of that into his music as well. R&RD: At this point were you featured playing more slide guitar in your live shows? Taylor: No, at that time it was still something that I played very rarely. It wasn’t until I got with the Rolling Stones that I started to play a lot of slide guitar.

R&RD: You did an instructional video with Arlen Roth a few years ago discussing some of your guitar techniques. I find it interesting that most slide guitarists use “open” bottleneck tunings of E, A, and G, yet you normally use the standard guitar tuning, which most people find far more difficult in playing slide.

Taylor: Well I do use the standard tuning, but I also use the open bottleneck tunings too. I believe Duane Allman used open tunings – most guitar players do. I think it is more interesting to play slide in the standard tuning and try to do what you can and switch from slide to regular lead guitar. You can’t do that in an open tuning. It’s much more versatile, because you’re not restricted to an open blues tuning. An “A” tuning more or less confines you to an Elmore James style and a “G” tuning more like a Delta blues kind of thing. I don’t consciously avoid it, but I do often play slide in a regular tuning unless it’s a sort of Mississippi Delta blues song, which requires an open tuning.

R&RD: What about a song like “Alabama” that was on your solo record?

Taylor: That’s in an open tuning, done in an open “E.”

R&RD: In the mid-60’s nearly every guitar player used a Gibson Les Paul exclusively. You used one, so did Clapton, Peter Green, and Jeff Beck. Now the trend seems to be towards Fenders. Robert Cray, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmy Vaughan, and Albert Collins all use Fenders.

Taylor: Well they are good guitars. The Fender turnaround comes from the Jimi Hendrix influence I think. I use a Fender Stratocaster nowadays with slightly different pickups and a Les Paul.

R&RD: Blues from a Laurel Canyon is considered by many to be a minor classic blues record. It features all-original writing from Mayall and some of your best and most versatile playing. What are your recollections of this album?

Taylor: It was a very popular album, I know that. It coincided with John Mayall’s move to America and that’s why all the lyrics are about Laurel Canyon and Sunset Boulevard and Los Angeles, California. It was about that period in his life when he decided he wanted to move to America. As far as my work with John Mayall I suppose this is my best work. I have to agree with you there.

R&RD: How do you feel about the two live albums you are on of Mayall’s?

Taylor: I thought they were o.k. The sound quality is not very good because of the method they used to record, which was a simple cassette machine-type thing with a condenser microphone in it on top of John Mayall’s Hammond organ, without even an ambience mike or anything like that. But of course they are an accurate representation of what was happening because they are sort of live historical tapes of what was going on at the time.

R&RD: Do you know if there is much unreleased Bluesbreakers material still lying around in the vaults somewhere?

Taylor: I don’t think there is too much, but there is some rather interesting live stuff that he has – I know that.

R&RD: Why did you leave John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers?

Taylor: Well, I wanted to leave for one thing. But John decided to change his format once again and decided to use just an acoustic guitar player, saxophone player, bass player, and no drummer. This was not what I wanted to do at all and we just sort of went our separate ways at the same time. But I did not know that the Rolling Stones had been looking for a guitar player for two or three months, and I suppose John Mayall must have mentioned to them that I was leaving him and I might be a good person to replace Brian Jones. So that’s kind of what happened.

R&RD: You were more or less asked to audition for the Stones weren’t you? You were invited to record for a few sessions so they could size you up, am I correct?

Taylor: Well, I went down to the studio and they were doing a couple of tracks for Let It Bleed, which I played on, and later on that night they asked me to join the band. It all happened in the same evening. I said, “Well, I’ll think about it for a couple of weeks.” (Laughs) I became a member of the band the next day. (Laughs again)

R&RD: Had you known Brian Jones and were you intimidated at all about having to step into his shoes?

Taylor: I didn’t know him at all, nor did I ever meet him before he died. On a musical level I wasn’t intimidated at all. I felt I was their equal as a musician…in fact I ended up feeling superior, but that’s another story.

As I’ve said before, they were just an R&B band until they began writing hit singles. So we all had the same roots -- I was a bit younger than them. I wouldn't say I was intimidated, but I was nervous for a while when I joined. Not so much because I was stepping into Brian Jones' shoes, but just because the whole experience of playing with a band that big was so different than playing with John Mayall.

But in some ways it might have been easier for me to do that first tour in 1969 than the rest of the band, because they hadn't toured America for several years. At least during that period they were off, I was on the road working the whole time. Once I got on stage with the Rolling Stones I came into my own.

R&RD: What was it like going from a respected ensemble like John Mayall's Bluesbreakers to the most infamous rock and roll band in the world?

Taylor: (In typical British understatement) Well it certainly was different. Like you said it was joining a legendary rock and roll band with a bunch of rock stars instead of a traditional blues band. But it all came down to the same thing. One thing that always impressed me about the Rolling Stones was how much they were into the blues and rhythm and blues. It was and probably still is their inspiration.

R&RD: On just a personal basis, what were those first few months like for you as a Rolling Stone?

Taylor: They were very hectic. We were rehearsing all the time, we did that Hyde Park concert, and then shortly after that we did a tour of America.

R&RD: Given that you were only about 20 years old at the time, weren't you sort of frightened by the Stones' circus-like atmosphere, high-powered accountants, and all that entourage mentality?

Taylor: No, I soon got used to it.

R&RD: Were any of them helping you along during your first year?

Taylor: How do you mean "helping me along"?

R&RD: Well, did they try to shelter you from some of the harsher aspects of being a Stone?

Taylor: (With a touch of bitterness in his voice) No, absolutely not! They didn't shelter me from nothing. They didn't "gimme shelter" at all. (Laughs)

R&RD: Musiclly this must have been a change for you, going from the blues purism of Mayall...

Taylor: It was an exciting change musically actually. I developed a lot as a musician and as a person and as a guitar player when I was with the Rolling Stones. I was with them for six years, during which time we toured the world and made five or six albums, which are now considered to be some of their finest. A lot of things happened. Six years is a long time -- at least it seemed like a long time then.

R&RD: In the Bluesbreakers you were probably the main visual attraction of the group. Mayall has said that kids came from all over and sat on the front rows to watch your fingers as you played. What was it like to go from being this kind of focal point to taking a back seat to Jagger and Keith Richards in concert?

Taylor: I think the thing with kids coming down to watch me play used to go on in the Rolling Stones too. I think I became sort of widely recognized as a good guitar player in my own right. Other people didn't just come for my guitar playing, obviously, but I think it was kind of like a highlight during that period. On-stage anyway.

R&RD: There was a concert movie that came out in the 70's called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards entirely dominated this film and I bet there weren't 10 shots of you...

Taylor: But they didn't make the movie, it was whoever made the movie, that's the way they saw it. It didn't bother me at all. In fact it would have bothered me a lot more if they had been concentrating on me. Me, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts greatly appreciated the relative amount of privacy we had. We were glad all the attention was on Mick and Keith, and after all it would have been anyway because they were the Rolling Stones. They are the Rolling Stones, basically. They wrote all the songs, it was their band.

R&RD: What were the musical ingredients you feel you added to the Stones?

Taylor: Apart from my talent as a guitar player? I don't know, I mean Keith Richards and me, although we both had different kinds of styles complemented each other in a very natural instinctive way and made the group sound interesting and different sometimes.

R&RD: In the film Gimme Shelter, which documented the disastrous Altamont concert, we see a very frightened Mick Jagger who doesn't know what to do and a Keith Richards who is very angry and wants to continue to play. The Mick Taylor we see is someone who seems bemused and doesn't quite know what's going on. Am I right?

Taylor: No, I had an absolute awareness of what was going on. I think we all did. There was a certain point in the show where we said to each other "we had better keep on playing, otherwise this could get even worse." Of course it did get worse, but we all felt that to stop playing would have been even worse. There could have been a bigger riot and even more trouble.

R&RD: Were you guys scared out of your wits up there?

Taylor: Well, it wasn't one of my more memorable or enjoyable gigs (laughs). I think they would all say that -- we just had to get through it.

R&RD: What was your reaction when you found out someone had been murdered?

Taylor: It was very depressing -- you can just imagine.

R&RD: What was your relationship like with the other various Stones members?

Taylor: We were good friends, all of us were. I suppose Keith was who I hung out the most with.

R&RD: When you first joined the Rolling Stones you were a health food convert...

Taylor: (interrupts) No I wasn't, but that's what got reported, but it's not true.

R&RD: Everyone knows about Keith Richards' many problems, from his numerous drug busts to his very visible deterioration from heroin. It has been rumored that when you left the Stones you had a few of these kinds of problems yourself. Did you find it impossible to keep away from that whirlwind of vice that goes hand in hand with the Stones?

Taylor: Yes I did find it impossible. I went through similar things to Keith myself, but it didn't end when I left the Rolling Stones. It was part of my lifestyle too, I guess...

R&RD: Keith, it would appear, has gotten somewhat back on track. Is it true that you've been able to get some of your problems behind you?

Taylor: I have yes.

R&RD: The rumors I've heard are that addictions to alcohol, cocaine, and heroin are all part of your past problems. True?

Taylor: I will answer you by saying that, yes, they were a problem, but now they are not. I'm not going to illuminate on my personal life, not tonight. Maybe some other time. (Laughs an unnaturally long time.)

R&RD: Do you at all miss being a part of this huge thing that was the Stones?

Taylor: No, I don't really anymore. I did for a long time, but I don't anymore because I have my own band together and I'm touring around playing in clubs and playing in theatres. I just got back from a tour of Europe. I'm actually enjoying playing more than I ever have and I'm singing and playing really well.

R&RD: What about the social life of the Stones -- the Truman Capote, Lee Radziwill, Margaret Trudeau jet set climate -- were you at all a part of that?

Taylor: No, not really. Bianca used to be a good friend, but that had nothing to do with the social life of the Rolling Stones. I know what you're talking about but those people used to just come around for a few gigs on one tour, but there was no real social life as such or lasting friendships that were formed.

R&RD: Probably the two most important albums you worked on with the Stones were Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street. Sticky Fingers seemed to be a very well-planned record, almost calculated. Exile on the other hand is known and loved for its looseness, rawness, and haphazard feel. Would you care to comment on them?

Taylor: Well, they were both Rolling Stones records and they were both good. I don't see them that intellectually or anything, as one being more orchestrated and one being more raw. Exile On Main Street was done in a much rougher sort of way. We did it in a basement in Keith's house in the south of France and it took a long time. Lots of songs were made up as we were playing. I think Sticky Fingers was a bit more planned in the sense that most of the songs were together before we started recording.

R&RD: Following your tenure with the Stones, what did you do afterwards?

Taylor: Immediately after the Stones I played with Jack Bruce for about six months. We did a tour of Europe and did a bit of recording in England and hung out together a lot, but we didn't accomplish very much. We didn't stay together very long.

R&RD: There wasn't a record that came together was there?

Taylor: No there wasn't one. It was basically because we just didn't stay together long enough to make one.

R&RD: Musically, wasn't this quite a departure for you. Bruce was into a more avant garde jazz thing at this time wasn't he?

Taylor: We were playing his music, and his music is jazzy, bluesy, all kinds of things. It was a departure, yeah, but I didn't really think about it. It was just something to do.

R&RD: You did a solo album in 1979 on the Columbia label that received good notices but did not sell well. There has been some controversy about going far over budget, wasting an inordinate amount of time in the studio, and a lot of wasted musicians...

Taylor: There was no controversy. It happened just the way you say. I won't argue with your statement at all. It was a pretty good first attempt, I think, and I learned a lot from it. I'm hoping to do a new record very soon, actually, with my own band, which I'm looking forward to a lot. I've been playing with a band now on and off for about three years and I'm really ready to get back into the studio and do something. So it won't be a solo project in the same sense as the other one was. I got offered a great record deal by CBS in 1979 and they basically said, "do whatever you want, take as long as you want." And so of course I did. It's good to have deadlines and limits, especially when you don't exactly know what you are doing.

R&RD: In the interim period there have been no more albums, but you have played impressively on several other people's albums including Joan Jett, Joe Henry, and Bob Dylan. Has this been fulfilling to you.

Taylor: Very fulfilling, especially the one with Bob Dylan. That was great. It came about after he came to a show I was doing at a place called the Roxy on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1982 with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, during the time we got back together for a couple of years, and I met him backstage and he asked me if I would be interested in recording with him when he ws ready to make an album. Of course when he was ready to make Infidels in New York I went to New York and was involved in that record. About a year later he went on the road in Europe and he asked me to put a band together. I enjoyed that.

I think I'm playing the best stuff I've ever played right now but I haven't got anything on record just yet. Max Middleton (the celebrated pianist on Jeff Beck's Rough and Ready and other albums) is someone I've known for a long time. We've done some good instrumentals together and various things we've written together that are good. When we first played together it was more of a fusion kind of thing, but over the years we've become more of an R&B band, with me singing a lot. I enjoy singing a lot now even though I didn't do it much in the past. It's a necessary part of what I want to do.

R&RD: Who are some of the younger guitar players who you find interesting.

Taylor: I can't think of anybody.

R&RD: Well, why don't I run down a few names? Stevie Ray Vaughan?

Taylor: He's o.k. I like him.

R&RD: What about Jimmy Vaughan?

Taylor: (With more enthusiasm) I like him a lot. I think he's a very tasteful blues guitar player. He's great. I like the Thunderbirds.

R&RD: How about Albert Collins?

Taylor: I heard him a long time ago when I was listening to my first blues records.

R&RD: Changing the subject here, I would like to ask the Million Dollar Question. Exactly why did you leave the Rolling Stones? There doesn't seem to be a definitive answer.

Taylor: That's really too complicated for me to go into right now. My reasons were many and varied and that's all I can say. They were mostly personal reasons, not musical reasons, no artistic differences or anything silly like that. I suppose I did have a musical vision I wanted to pursue, but it's taken me a long time to realize that. I had no clear cut vision when I left the Rolling Stones. It was mostly personal problems, my own mostly.

R&RD: I found it interesting that you were invited to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony with the other Stones to collect an award. How did that come about?

Taylor: Because I was included, that's why I was invited to the reception. I don't know whose idea it was, I don't know who the nominating committee are for that, but I suppose I was with the Rolling Stones long enough to have made a difference to what they did during that period. Everyone else was getting one so I was included too. It was fun but I didn't get a chance to speak to the guys.

R&RD: I suppose you know that the awards show has given rise to rumors that you will be rejoining the Stones?

Taylor: I've heard those rumors too, but I don't think there's any truth to them at all. I think they are busy making a record at the moment and they are hoping to get it down so they can go on and tour by the end of the year. I haven't been asked to play on the album or to go on tour, but if I were asked to play I'd play.

R&RD: Final question. How would you like to be remembered when all is said and done?

Taylor: Just as a good guitar player.

Quentin Tarantino Lauds Our Friend Linda Haynes

2004-07-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

Many of you know of my long-time friendship with actress Linda Haynes Sylvander and some of you even met her when she came to Memphis to visit. She is one of my dearest friends and our friendship began as the result of a quest of many years to find her. I had seen the 1970's revenge flick Rolling Thunder starring William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones in addition to Linda. Well I thought it was a terrific film and was completely knocked out by the grittiest performance of its time by Linda. You film buffs know how Warren Oates could absolutely bring a B movie to life? Well, Linda could do the same thing to a film and to top it off she was (and is) about a million light years better looking than Warren.

One of the few things I have ever lost that I highly valued was a set of movie stills from Rolling Thunder, one of which was THE PERFECT photo of Linda (see a somewhat decent copy of it on my web site at www.tomgraves.addr.com

I have been trying to find more copies of the photo and I stumbled across a statement by Quentin Tarantino regarding Rolling Thunder, one of his favorite films. It is a long story, but it was strictly due to Mr. Tarantino that I was able to find Linda. Anyway, the long quote was published on the highly respected film web site www.ain'titcool.

After Tarantino's long quote ain'titcool further lauds Linda. I include the pertinent parts herewith. I told Linda that if Quentin Tarantino, one of a handful of great American directors of the last decade, said such things about me I could die a contented man. So here it is for you guys. Please notice (ahem, pat myself on the back) that what I've been saying about Linda for about 20 years is EXACTLY the same thing said by Tarantino, et al. Ahhhh, vindication. All those who thought I was nuts to spend such time and moolah tracking Linda down, apologies will be accepted. The beauty of tracking Linda down ultimately wasn't about writing a profile of this fascinating person, but about becoming her friend. That was reward enough.

"However, ROLLING THUNDER played next, and as far as I’m concerned it kicked ENTER THE DRAGON’s fucking ass. ROLLING THUNDER, I just love. It’s a character study and an action film. The first half was getting to know Charlie Rane and the second half was pure revenge. In the first half we find out about how Charlie Rane was a P.O.W. for 7 years. How he suffered through the camps, tortured, malnourished, beaten… the whole time telling himself that once he got back home everything would be o.k. Just get me back home. That life would be good. That he’d have his wife and his son and everything would be happily ever after. He comes back, finds out that his wife is going to marry another man. That his son doesn’t even know him. And just as he’s coming to grips with that, they’re both killed and he loses his hand to thieves searching for a bunch of silver dollars. Everything is not ok. Everything is fucked up" - Note: This was very hard to catch because Quentin is in full machine gun mode delivery. Repeating half repeating… very excited about the film… My notes are good, but not complete. "Now there were a lot of folks trying out for the role of Major Charles Rane. Joe Don Baker was considered. Even David Carridine, but it was fate that landed William Devane in what is the best role of his career." "Tommy Lee Jones went basically straight from JACKSON COUNTY JAIL into ROLLING THUNDER, although there was this TV thing he did where he played Howard Hughes" "However, THE performance of the film for me is Linda Haynes as Linda Forchet! She was in one of the sleepers for the first QT fest THE NICKEL RIDE, she was in Pam Grier’s COFFY… she was the girl that reaches into Grier’s afro when she has the razors in there and ‘aaaahhhh’. But Linda Forchet is my favorite female character in a Paul Schrader movie. She looks like she’s been left out in the rain one day too many. She has that look that Ava Gardner got, you know blousey, but it took Ava years to do it, and Linda Haynes just did it naturally. And I mean that in a good way." "James Best, my old acting teacher, plays the main sonuvabitch in the film" "Now the thing was at the time when Schrader’s script was nearing production, a young writer that had written a really hot non-produced script at the time was brought in to work on it. His name was Heywood Gould. His script was FT APACHE THE BRONX" Quentin believes that Heywood wrote the film he likes best. And credits Gould with bringing in elements that really made the film work all the way across the board for him. So… What did I think of ROLLING THUNDER?
Well, I thought it ruled pretty dang hard. I’ve seen the trailer for going on 12 years of my life thus far… and ever since being introduced to the QT-taste buds for film, and knowing he loved this film enough to name a company after it… My expectations were fairly dang high. From the beginning of the film I could tell this was something intelligent and deliberate. You get that feeling sometimes when watching a quality flick. I remember sitting in the theater watching SILENCE OF THE LAMBS that first time and that Tak Fujimoto tracking shot alongside Jodie Foster’s head and shoulders as she jogged… there was something mesmerizing about it. The same could be said with the setting up of the welcome community in San Antonio, the private jet of ‘heroes’ returning from captivity in Vietnam… Tommy Lee Jones’ fears, William Devane’s confidence… It was utterly hypnotic and foreboding. There’s just an air of wrongness at the beginning of the film. Too much jubilation for those that don’t want it, but do for those that need to cheer. Then there is the disintegration of his life. Devane plays Charles Rane as an internalized disciplined MAN (all caps). He doesn’t cry for others, doesn’t despair for others, doesn’t become tormented for others. He bottles all his emotions save love for his family and pride. He isn’t the sort of guy to take a swing at an insult, but rather retort with a story to give you nightmares or to demonstrate his pure strength of will and determination through self-degradation. He is as scary as they come. The revenge version of Charles Rane is another animal all together. It is as if he never got to torment or kill those that tortured him for all those years imprisoned. He didn’t need to, his revenge was to live happily ever after while those bastards rotted in grass and bamboo huts in Vietnam. But here… when what happens to him happens. No, he knows jail is too easy to survive for these bastards. He knows that it would become a lifestyle they could endure, and that… he could not endure. He must kill these people badly. Then there’s Linda Forchet… I agree with Quentin, she is a marvel in this film. I love her dearly based on a single viewing. She has, what I like to call… ‘Comfortable Beauty’. What I mean is this, today… so many actresses working in Hollywood films are just plain gorgeous… they have that unapproachable perfection about them. They seem like dolls to keep mint behind glass that you dare not touch. There’s almost a fear to become intimate for fear of breaking the illusion. And there are women like this walking the earth we walk on every day. ‘Comfortable Beauty’ is a state of loveliness that you instantly want to engage in conversation, drinking with, watching films with, living with, spending time with. You can see no harsh lines, but an ability to adapt and swing with in life. There is an openness and ease to Linda Haynes’ Forchet that is absolutely entrancing to me. I believe I fall deeply madly for her when she picks up the revolver and shotgun and begins telling stories about her being the tom boy of the litter. She’s that girl, and that’s my favorite type. "

The Blackwood Brothers Quartet

2004-07-08T17:31:00.000-07:00

Note: The following article of mine appeared in the July 2 special issue of The Memphis Flyer that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the birth of rock and roll in Memphis

1954 - 1963

The Third Rail of Rock-and-Roll

Paying respect to the greatest of gospel groups.

By Tom Graves

One week before Elvis Presley struck a chord heard 'round the world at Sun Studio, he heard news on the radio so devastating that he spent more than half an hour in Gaston Park crying bitter tears over the tragedy. Two members of the most famous gospel group in history, the Blackwood Brothers Quartet, had died in front of hundreds of spectators at a county fair in Clanton, Alabama. The 10-seater Beechcraft airplane the Blackwoods used to fly to their appearances crashed and exploded during a practice take-off and landing. Two group members were on the ground watching in horror with the rest of the crowd as the plane stalled and fell nose down, piloted by R.W. Blackwood and bass singer Bill Lyles.

There is some debate over which gospel group Elvis most favored the Blackwoods or the Statesmen Quartet. What there should be no debate about is that Southern gospel music was the music Elvis most loved and was most influenced by. There were many days in Elvis' life when he heard not one note of rock-and-roll, blues, country, or soul. But there were very few in which he did not hear music by one of the many gospel groups he adored. James Blackwood once told a reporter that the last album Elvis listened to was by the Stamps Quartet. Insiders at Graceland have said the album still sits on the turntable.

Of all the biographers and critics and musicologists who have explored ad nauseam every facet of Elvis' musical life, scandalously few pages have been devoted to his greatest passion, gospel music. Why? There are several reasons. The most apparent is that few of these writers hail from these parts and thus were not exposed to the Blackwoods, the Statesmen, the Happy Goodman Family, the Florida Boys, and the Dixie Echoes, as many Memphians were on every Sunday morning for over two decades. The born-again movement that began in earnest in the 1970s also, in effect, balkanized music tastes. Country gospel music became wholly identified with low-church fundamentalism and polyester suits. Before this social change, however, many gospel fans who would not ordinarily darken the door of a church on a Sunday morning, such as Elvis Presley who, contrary to myth, was not much of a churchgoer would have a sweaty, stompin' good time at the All Nite Sings at Ellis Auditorium.

The Blackwood Brothers were the first gospel group to sell over a million records, the first to sign to a major record label (RCA), and the first to get nationwide television exposure (on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, which, incidentally, they won). And they made Memphis their headquarters for over 50 years. Today, you would be hard-pressed to find a Memphian under the age of 40 who has ever heard of the Blackwoods, much less could name any of their songs. Yet virtually every one of the musical giants who came out of Sun Records, particularly the white ones, owed musical debts to the Blackwoods, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash, who wrote a song for the group.

People who still believe that white gospel music did not cross over to black audiences should note that so many requests were phoned in to Ellis Auditorium at the funeral for the two Blackwoods who died in the plane crash that the balcony was reserved for black mourners. And it was full. The funeral procession that day is believed to be the biggest in Memphis history until the King himself died in 1977.

After the crash and funeral, the Blackwoods regrouped and brought in one of the greatest bass singers to ever overshadow a stage, J.D. Sumner, who later toured with Elvis. Sumner was like no one before or since a revelation as a singer who brought a rhythmic, boogie beat to the staid gospel field. He was a superb songwriter (you've got to hear his vision of heaven as a Hawaiian Eden in "Paradise Island") and a great entertainer who could bring down the house with his deadpan ad-libs. At the other end of the quartet was Bill Shaw, a high tenor as remarkable as any competitor on the Atlantic Records R&B roster. Bear Family Records in Germany last year put out a terrific, if expensive, boxed set of the group's pre-1960 recordings. But the Blackwoods recorded many more treasures after that, up until the departure of Sumner for the Stamps Quartet (which was owned by the Blackwoods' company). One example of the group's vocal acrobatics is their cover of the Dixie Hummingbirds' "The Devil Can't Harm a Praying Man," where they morph their style from black gospel to white and back again, all in homage to the black gospel groups the Blackwoods revered and championed. During the days of segregation in the South, the Blackwoods frequently booked the legendary black gospel group the Golden Gate Quartet on their tours. And white audiences loved them.

If there's one group America needs to rediscover before the historical rust obliterates this music form, it's the Blackwoods and their singular gospel-quartet style. Shortly before his death from a series of strokes in 2002, James Blackwood, the sole surviving original member of the quartet, quietly admitted his hurt when in tribute after tribute to Memphis music the Blackwoods more often than not were not mentioned.

There is one person in Memphis' music past who would never have allowed such a thing to happen. This same person won his only Grammys with million-selling gospel albums that in large measure paid tribute to a group few now bother to remember.

BETWEEN THE CRACKS: THE 100 BEST ALBUMS YOU DON'T HAVE

2004-05-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

Note: These are a few of the 100 entries I am at this time working on for this book project.

Okay, we all have seen the lists of the absolutely greatest LPs, singles, movies, TV shows, books, etc. of ALL TIME. I’ve done them myself, they are fun, they show off your quirks and personality to an extent, and, let’s face it, an awful lot of the selections is repetitive. Who could deny Citizen Kane, or Sgt. Pepper, or “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay”? So, why not go a whole different approach and list those albums you are pretty sure the other guys either don’t have, haven’t heard of, or will strongly disagree with? Well, that’s what this list is all about – quirks, quirks, quirks.
When it comes to music, again let’s be honest, we all tend to get mired in the tastes of our own generation. Our great grandparents who dug the shit out of Rudy Vallee could not be expected to shift gears radically enough to fully appreciate the aesthetics of a Van Morrison. Or could they? I love the best tracks from Nirvana (definitely not of my g-g-g-generation) but can’t stand most of the grunge crap that came afterwards. And I still think that 99 percent of rap music will be in history’s dustbin (98 percent for everything else). But damn, that one percent rocks like a motherfucker.

And another thing...those lists that make you split hairs over which Beatles albums are in the top ten. Sheeeeeiiiittttt. All the Beatles, most of the Stones, most Elvis, most Al Green, Otis, Booker T., Bob Dylan, etc. albums belong in the pantheon. So stop wasting list space and do what I’m doing. Go for stuff that maybe you ain’t got. I’d love to see your list, baby.

These are in NO particular order of importance. Got that?

Canned Heat - Living the Blues

Canned Heat did what no other 60's rock group can claim. They singlehandedly made the term boogie a national music joke. It became at least as corny as wannabe hipsters flashing the peace sign back in the day. Their second lead singer, Al Wilson, was so bad that alleycats still hold their ears. But this double-LP has got some fine moments and you know it has to be good because only one song on the whole thing ever makes it onto Canned Heat’s greatest hits packages. They do terrific remakes here of “Walkin’ By Myself” and “Pony Blues” and a wow-inducing acid-drench-a-thon in the little heard “One Kind Favor.” On LP number one the highlight is the nearly 20 minute “Parthenogenesis” which is a hodgepodge of the band’s solo moments and contains the most incredible blues jew’s harp playing I have ever heard. This is a visionary track, blues taken to a Sgt. Pepper level of creative out there. The only bad moment is the obligatory, but thankfully brief, drum solo. Also incredible is Al Wilson’s raga-ish chromatic harp solo.

If that isn’t enough the entire 2nd LP is one song – the dreaded “Boogie.” But it starts off with a primal wail of feedback-drenched elephant honk that is almost better than “Ball and Chain,” Janis Joplin’s only great song thanks to that criminally underrated garage band of hers, Big Brother and the Holding Company. When the band comes in together on the boogie, they have left John Lee Hooker way behind. Understand Hooker cannot be topped, ever, but these boys know that and decide to instead blow the doors off the auditorium (did I say this was recorded live?). Even the bass solo here is good. Once again a dreaded drum solo. Nothing’s perfect. If you can pick this up cheap, go for it. I’ve got an expensive retooled vinyl copy. Bliss!!!!

Kraftwerk – The Mix

Many of you will remember this musical oddity from the mid-seventies, a quartet of nerdy engineer-looking Germans sitting deadpan in front of an intimidatingly large bank of synthesizers and playing a repetitive-themed song called “Autobahn” that in a long, slow, hypnotic pulse suggested the monotony of freeway driving. It was a clever piece, a novelty of its day, and these Germans spearheaded a small but influential music subgenre now termed “krautrock.” They also created one of the funniest shticks of any group ever. Ralf and Florian, two for-real music engineers and nerds supreme, formed the group basically to tinker with computerized music. They took their nerdiness to showbiz level, wearing business suits when everyone else on the scene was sporting glitter. When they were accused of sounding “fascist” they donned blazing red shirts (Commie colors for you babies) with Nazi-youth looking uniforms, completely turning the accusations on their head. The late Lester Bangs wrote one of his best pieces ever on Kraftwerk and in his interview with them he egged on their Teutonic bluster and it was obvious they all had a sporting time of it all and, more importantly, all got the joke.

This CD marked the first time in years Ralf and Florian recorded again as Kraftwerk. The reason is because the rudimentary noises of “Autobahn” became the foundation of much of hip-hop’s sampling and their pioneering electronics exploded into a new worldwide technology. No wonder they didn’t get to the studio much. What they do here is take some of their best-remembered tracks and give them a thorough updating. Their redo of “Autobahn” is sheer genius, taking that slow brontosaurus pulse and giving it a T. Rex’s bite. The weird humor ain’t left ‘em either, with a hilarious synthesized yodeling coda. And those zooming car sounds that livened up the original have been recreated to sound like a speedway in your house. The lead track here, “Robots,” is maybe the most danceable German song to come out of the rock era, yet fully retains that goosestepping attitude that makes the Germans, well, the Germans. After listening to this song there should be no doubt that the future belongs to the robots and, like it or not, they will have a sense of humor.

Roger Miller – Golden Hits (Mercury 826 261-2)

There are several Roger Miller CDs and compilations but trust me, this is the ONE. In the mid-sixties, during the reign of the Beatles and Stones, came this twang-talking peckerwood from the Deep South who had a string of the most unclassifiable hits ever. They weren’t exactly pop, not exactly country, certainly not folk, or were they? Miller, like Woody Guthrie, Dylan, and hell, I can’t think of ‘em all at the moment, was an American original, a guy who could write just as well about hoboing around the country, with an admission he’d steal in a minute, as visiting England for the first time. What made Miller a great artist was his extraordinary wordplay, a love of words and the very sound of them. No other songwriter could have come up with this great couplet: “Roses are red/Violets are purple/Sugar’s sweet/and so is maple surple.” And make it all sound as natural as cornbread and molasses.

Lagniappe: I worked under a grant to teach creative writing to inner city 7th graders for a year, a book in itself (the title: Gorilla Pimp, the endearment bestowed upon me). Anyway, for a few classes I decided to play these youngsters songs with interesting and surprising lyrics that I knew they would not have been exposed to. One great revelation was that the kids, my kids, were utterly fascinated by the mystery of the Beatles’ “Blackbird.” The way they grappled with the idea of non-literal meaning is a high point of my creative life. Against my better judgment I played Roger Miller’s hilarious ode to stumbling upon a mess o’ moonshine “Chug-a-lug.” For days these black children were heard up and down the halls of Hickory Ridge Middle School singing “Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug/Makes you wanta holler hi-dee-ho.” Ah, the stories I will tell my grandkids.

Lester “Roadhog” Moran and His Cadillac Cowboys (aka The Statler Brothers) – Alive at the Johnny Mack Brown High School (Mercury Records)

I once proposed a serious article on the making of this classic comedy LP to a very serious magazine putting together their very serious annual All Music Issue and was met with a collective “huh?” from the editors. Such is life.

Imagine if you will the entire Monty Python cast forced with shotguns at their backs to travel the rural American South visiting the worst imaginable backwater honky-tonks with their only time off being to watch Hee-Haw reruns. Then as a reward they were paid extravagant sums of money to come up with a comedy album based on these experiences. Well, Alive at the Johnny Mack Brown High School is it, only it was The Statler Brothers, and not Monty Python doing the work. It would be hard to tell the difference, because this is about the most surreal take on cornpone humor ever waxed, and the album circulated for years to audiences who had no idea it was The Statler Brothers. Just like Monty Python’s Holy Grail, I knew guys when the LP came out who could perform this entire LP with every guttural “Alll-Right” spoken by the deep-voiced Roadhog imitated to perfection. What this hilarious fraud pretends to be is a live recording of an unbelievably bad country band at a rural high school dance, where fights break out, lyrics to country classics are mangled beyond recognition, guitars are wildly out of tune, and in the most politically correct of times the Cadillac Cowboys have the audacity to start naming a roster of country music greats and when Roadhog comes to the name of Charley Pride he pauses then says, “He’s the only n..., the only n..., (long breath), the only name that ain’t on our list. Alll-Right.”

The Cadillac Cowboys’ take on “Sixteen Tons” simply must be heard to be believed. Words alone cannot begin to describe this vocal trainwreck. Likewise a version of “Hey Joe.”

This is just side one. Side two is “The Saturday Morning Radio Show No.2" where besides the Cadillac Cowboys we get a sampling of the “local” talent. If you have never heard a country radio station from waaaaay back yonder, then this will be the only introduction you ever need. The liner notes and photos and cover art also are alll-right and howdy-howdy, doth quote the Roadhog.

Masters of Reality – Sunrise on the Sufferbus

As a long-time music scribe I have vented my spleen times a-plenty on the lack of good drumming in today’s music. Oh, there are some inventive programmers out there who can tart things up a bit, but name three drummers in the last decade who were really anything more than glorified timekeepers. Many drummers nowadays cannot even accomplish that. Imagine my shock and amazement when I was driving in Memphis to nowhere in particular and this track comes on the radio where the drums are going off like a string of M-80s and the rhythm is not only nitro-fueled, but there are more drum fills, thrills, and spills than the days of Keith Moon and his monster drum kit. I kid you not, I literally pulled over to the side of the road so that I could hear the name of the band so I could find out who this four-handed drummer was. It had been years since I had heard drumming of such jaw-dropping virtuosity. And all to back up a minimalist power chord band.

The good news was that it was indeed a new band, the bad news was that it was Ginger Baker, GINGER BAKER!!!!!, on drums. But that bad news was actually good news, except for the fact that it took a sixtysomething year old legend to make me pull over to the side of the road. Baker had recorded only sporadically over the years since his heyday with Cream and Blind Faith, and he obviously preferred jazz to rock and polyrhythms from his African jaunts to hanging out with long-haired boys with Marshall stacks. How the band, Masters of Reality, talked Baker into this one-shot album would probably make an interesting story in itself. As is, the album is as good as it is curious. There are killer hard rock tracks such as the aforementioned pull-to-the-side-of-the-road tune, “She Got Her Dress On,” lovely ballads with some super-slick drum licks, and a song by Baker about his pet American peeve – that he can’t get a good cup of tea out of us Yanks. The song is clever and funny, but the drumwork! – damn! After this album Baker went back to Arizona to play jazz only and play polo. Believe you me it is our loss and the horses’ gain.

Jerry Lee Lewis – Live at the Star Club (Bear Family version)

Maybe it’s just a holdover from adolescence, but I always enjoyed those “who’s better?” debates. You know, who’s better, B.B. King or Albert King? The Beatles or the Stones? James Brown or Otis Redding? I even like those apples and oranges comparisons such as “who’s the better guitar player, Chuck Berry or Jeff Beck?” Debates spark interest and interest sparks excitement.
Okay then, I’ve got one for you. Who’s the better piano player, Keith Emerson (of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer for those of you born after that fad) or Jerry Lee? My opinion? Hands down it’s Jerry Lee. Why? Well, Emerson can undoubtedly whip out a decent “Toccata and Fugue” by Bach that might even impress classical snobs, but honestly who would you rather see play a piano with his ass, Keith Emerson or the Killer? If your answer is the former rather than the latter then don’t ever go clubbing with me.

Jerry Lee Lewis is a category unto himself because no one else would dare to be like him. Right here in Memphis there is an excellent “tribute artist” who does a killer Killer named Jason D. Williams, but compared to the real deal Jason seems positively civilized. Which Jerry Lee isn’t and never has been. His live recording in 1964 at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, the joint that the Beatles made famous, is all the proof you’ll ever need that civility is overrated. Think about it, during the same year the Beatles were eating up the charts in America and Jerry Lee Lewis was reduced to playing prom dances, someone came up with the idea of putting this twentysomething year old rock and roll has-been in the whore-saturated Reeperbahn club that was already attracting Beatles tourists.

There is much conjecture among Jerry Lee afficionados about what he was on when this recording was made. The playing is so hard, ferocious, and unrelenting that it seems as if Jerry Lee, and not Elvis, should be dubbed the atomic-powered singer, because nuclear fission seems to be about the only thing that could explain this much entertainment combustion. Or lots and lots of amphetamines (my guess).

The set is backed by the Nashville Teens, the British group that despite its wimpy-sounding name came up with a pile-driving hit cover of “Tobacco Road,” and they do an admirable job trying to keep up with the rocket sled. Jerry Lee starts off with a growl then explodes into a version of “Mean Woman Blues.” During his take on “Money” he goes off into a jaunt of singing “ha-ha-ha-ha” repeatedly and makes it sound good. Then he yodels a verse’s worth or so, and on it goes. The crowd recognizes real rock and roll danger when it sees it and after about the sixth time of chanting “Jerry Lee, Jerry Lee, Jerry Lee” between songs, the Killer has had enough of the fan worship and snarls out “alright already!” On this one night in 1964 in Hamburg, Germany it is hard to believe that anyone, anyone, could have topped this pompadored force of nature who makes sure he gets in at least one self-reference per song. And just think who all he has outlived.

The Cramps – Off the Bone

The year was 1977 and in Memphis the rumor went ‘round like a shot that the first ever punk rock band was to play in town, an unknown group called The Cramps, a name that had pretty much everyone scratching their heads. Word was they had been doing some recording in Memphis, with Alex Chilton, of all people, producing. The Cramps were cloaked in mystery and menace and by the time they actually played this gig, people were whispering that they ate live children.

The day before their show, I was driving down a major midtown avenue and saw what had to be the strangest looking white couple I’d seen in a decade or two strolling hand in hand down the sidewalk. The guy, was tall, lanky, with a rooster’s comb of unruly and obviously dyed black hair; the other, the girl, had a permed electric frizz, kohl-rimmed eyes and seemed half the man’s height. “Hey honey,” I said to my then wife, “I’ll bet that’s those Cramps. What do you say we give them a ride?” “Don’t you DARE!” was the answer, thus ending at least one story I could tell the grandkids.

I’ve always been surprised The Cramps never rose beyond their hardcore cult following. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them on a best-of list of any kind. But boy do they deserve something. Even in that early era of shock rock and shock jocks and shock everything else, The Cramps always went to the brink and jumped off. They were no pose.

To see what I mean check out one of the few available videos of them on Urghhh! A Music War, the punk documentary, and tell me they don’t raise your eyebrows higher than anyone else. Lead singer and front madman Lux Interior looks like what Elvis’s twin brother might have had he been born completely deranged and hidden in a closet for most of his life, having been forced to listen to that pretty Elvis’s music. In this video Lux, shirtless, does Jim Morrison’s leather pants one better by wearing a pair that covers only half his ass and doesn’t quite make it covering his pubic hair. He does just about everything but backflips and those leather britches still manage to stay up. Then he takes his microphone and performs fellatio on it, but does it in such a maniacal, exaggerated way that you will be on the floor laughing, as I was. And his main squeeze, Ivy Rorshach, impassive as the sphinx, watches and plays her guitar. Is she real or a mannikin? Only a window dresser would know for sure.

Okay, okay, the music. Off the Bone is kind of, sort of a greatest hits package, but a band this weird can’t really fit completely into one compilation. But as an album standing on its own merit, this album packs more genuine rockabilly dementia and warpage than a hundred Stray Cats. Take their take of Charlie Feathers’ “I Can’t Hardly Stand It.” Feathers was about the most out there of the rockabillies to start with, with more vocal hiccups and spasms than all the early hitmakers put together. But Lux Interior takes Feathers and pushes the vocals so far into outer space that there’s no oxygen left – and in space no one can hear you hiccup. But hiccup he does, incredible vocal belches that have everyone I’ve ever played this song for in stitches. Oh, and when he comes to the verse, he sings it with a perfect tremolo effect that is the work of his double-jointed vocal cords and not the recording studio. The Cramps infused rock and roll with a Creepy magazine ghoul flavor and found the most obscure covers imaginable to amp up beyond endurance. I could rave about this album for many more pages, but I’ll leave you with an example of Lux Interior’s poetic muse from the song “Human Fly”: “I’m a human fly/and I don’t know why/and I buzz, buzz, buzz/and it’s just becuzz...I got 96 tears/and 96 eyes.” As I say, they certainly deserve something.

The Blackwood Brothers – Greatest Hits (or whatever you can find)

There is a CD out finally of what purports to be the Blackwood Brothers greatest hits but the truth is no Blackwoods greatest hits package has ever done this unheralded great vocal group proper justice. The Blackwood Brothers, in case you’ve never heard of them, are the biggest gospel group in history. One could even say in all seriousness that they were the Beatles of the gospel world; such was the power and respect for them in their glory days. They became a national phenomenon in 1954 about a month before Elvis, who was thoroughly besotted with the group, recorded “That’s Allright, Mama.” They were already huge in the South and Midwest, but a succession of appearances on the highly-rated Arthur Godfrey Show catapulted them nationally. They were signed to RCA, the big time indeed, and were racking up record sales. Disaster struck in July 1954 when the 10-seater Beechcraft they flew to their gigs crashed on a practice take-off in front of thousands of fairgoers. Two members were on the ground. Two died on impact.

The funeral for the two members in the plane crash was held at Ellis Auditorium (where Elvis soon thereafter performed) and is reported to have been the biggest funeral service in Memphis until the King himself died. People who still believe that white music did not cross over to black audiences should note that so many requests were phoned in to Ellis Auditorium that the balcony was reserved specifically for black mourners. And it was full.

After the crash, the Blackwoods regrouped and brought in one of the great bass singers to ever overshadow a stage, J.D. Sumner, who later toured with Elvis. Sumner was like no one before or since – a revelation as a singer, who brought a rhythmic, boogie beat to the staid gospel field, a superb songwriter (you’ve got to hear his vision of heaven as a Hawaiian Eden in “Paradise Island”), and he was a great entertainer who could bring down the house with his deadpan ad-libs. At the other end of the quartet was Bill Shaw, a high tenor as good as any competitor on the roster at Atlantic Records. Bear Family last year put out a terrific, if expensive, box set of the group’s pre-1960 recordings. But the Blackwoods recorded many more treasures after that, up until the departure of Sumner for the Stamps Quartet (which was owned by the Blackwoods). One example of their vocal aerobics is their cover of the Dixie Hummingbirds’ “The Devil Can’t Harm A Praying Man” where they morph their style from black gospel to white and back again, all in homage to the black gospel groups the Blackwoods openly adored. If there’s one group America needs to rediscover before the historical rust obliterates this music form, it’s the Blackwoods and their singular gospel quartet style.