God Help the Troubadour

by Ben Greenman

Phil Ochs was born five months before Bob Dylan and died sixteen months before Elvis Presley, and that tells you all you need to know about him, and that tells you nothing. Ochs was an earnest activist, and a rebel, and a satirist, and a town crier, and a crack-up. He built and dismantled personae with such rapidity that it’s sometimes difficult to find the real person who, in theory, provided the foundation on which those personae were built and dismantled. Born in Texas, raised in Ohio, gifted musically and culturally omnivorous, Ochs appeared on the Greenwich Village folk scene in 1962 and performed at Newport, the folkies’ Mecca, in 1963. Early on, he defined a certain kind of straightforwardly sardonic protest song, bringing Woody Guthrie’s plainspokenness into the tumult of the sixties. Bob Dylan famously remarked that Ochs was getting better and better, and that Dylan could’t keep up with him. In 1967, he took a sharp left turn in his work, abandoning guitar-and-voice for a lavishly pretentious folk-rock. He brooded, marvelously, and then broke out of the brooding with both gallows humor and lovely, clear poetry. Many of his most beloved songs come from this period, such as “Pleasures of the Harbor”and “Tape from California.”

Then came Ochs’ sixth album, Rehearsals for Retirement, which he released in 1969. The album was recorded after Ochs appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and it’s at once a document of the deepest despair—it grew out of terror and sorrow over the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the cover image was of Ochs’s tombstone—and a rollicking good time. “Pretty Smart on My Part,” the leadoff track, skips along on a fleet acoustic riff before descending into a disturbing, if hilarious, series of psychosexual portraits of America. Phil, in chracter, is menaced by a hitchhiker, whips a woman with big breasts, is terrorized by an intruder, experiences humiliation at the hands of the cops, and plots to assassinate the president. Elsewhere, Ochs is the subject of his own pained investigation: “My Life” is almost unbearably naked in both its sound and its subject (“My life,” he sings, “is now a death to me”). “William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park And Escapes Unscathed” is a ghostly piano ballad that, in its last thirty seconds, gives way to a glib bit of vaudeville:

Where were you in Chicago
You know I didn’t see you there
I didn’t see them break your head
Or breathe the tear gas air
Where were you in Chicago
When the fight was being fought
Where were you in Chicago
‘Cause I was in Detroit

The album closes with its spectral title song, which starts with one of the most depressing couplets in pop music (“The days grow longer for smaller prizes / I feel a stranger to surprises”) and gets worse from there. Worse, but not even more beautiful: Ochs’s singing in this period is, I think, his best: his limited range and keening style are a perfect match for both the personal lyrics and the more baroque production. “I wear a different kind of garment,” he sings, “in my rehearsals for retirement.”



As it turned out, the garment wasn’t metaphorical. After Rehearsals for Retirement, Ochs commissioned a gold suit from Nudie Cohn, Elvis Presley’s tailor, and transformed himself in a kind of pre-Andy Kaufman King manqué. That period produced exactly two records: the sarcastically titled Greatest Hits, in 1970, which consisted of all new material, and then Gunfight at Carnegie Hall, a chronicle of an utterly chaotic March 1970 live date that included a bomb threat that cut short the first show, an altercation with unhappy fans who wanted to get into the second show, and Ochs’s idiotic solution to this problem—he smashed the glass window of the box office, severely lacerating his thumb, and performed the second show with his hand bandaged. And that’s just the offstage drama. Onstage, Ochs played some of his beloved protest songs but also the standard “Mona Lisa,” Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee,” and medleys devoted to the work of Elvis and Buddy Holly.

Gunfight at Carnegie Hall was, for most purposes, the last of Ochs as a singer. He began to suffer from crippling writer’s block and equally crippling alcoholism. He traveled extensively (he was mugged in Tanzania, damaging his voice), became interested in Chilean politics, performed at a huge rally in Central Park in April 1975 when the Vietnam War ended. And then, the eternal darkness of madness: Ochs started telling people that he was a man named John Butler Train who had murdered the real Phil Ochs and taken his place. This eventually passed, but what remained behind was insurmountable depression and suicidal thinking. Ochs hanged himself on April 9, 1976.

Many artists have recorded tribute songs: Tom Paxton, Billy Bragg, John Wesley Harding, Todd Snider. Snider’s “Thin Wild Mercury” is built around the famous story of Ochs getting kicked out of Dylan’s taxicab after weighing in unfavorably on “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window.” Well, unfavorable is a relative term. “It’s not as good as ‘Positively 4th Street,’” Ochs said, telling the truth, and Dylan took the mixed review in stride, ordering the driver to stop the car and throwing Ochs out onto the sidewalk. He also delivered a parting shot that stung like an epitaph: “You’re not a folksinger, Ochs, you’re a journalist.”

And then, of course, there’s Dylan’s own “Lenny Bruce,” which isn’t about Ochs, except that it is. Ochs, of course, also wrote a song about Bruce (the heartbreaking “Doesn’t Lenny Live Here Anymore?”), and Dylan’s mournful, clumsy elegy starts by talking about freedom and rebellion and shining the light of truth in the eyes of power. It ends, though, in a cab, which makes me wonder if he’s been talking about Lenny Bruce at all:

Lenny Bruce is dead but he didn’t commit any crime

He just had the insight to rip off the lid before its time

I rode with him in a taxi once

Only for a mile and a half, seemed like it took a couple of months



Download:

“Pretty Smart On My Part” mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1969.
available on Rehearsals For Retirement

“William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park & Escapes Unscathed” mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1969.
available on Rehearsals For Retirement

"Chords of Fame" mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1970.
available on Phil Ochs Greatest Hits

“Tape From California” mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1970.
available on Gunfight at Carnegie Hall

“Thin Wild Mercury” mp3
by Todd Snider, 2006.
available on The Devil You Know

“Lenny Bruce” mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1981.
available on Shot of Love, 1981

"Doesn't Lenny Live Here Anymore?" mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1969.
available on Rehearsals For Retirement

Randy Newman

by Ben Greenman

Randy Newman is best known for his satirical character studies. You’ve heard them, of course: “Rednecks,” “My Life is Good,” “Political Science.” They’re portraits of deluded narrators who cling desperately to an outmoded or unpleasant or immoral idea: racism or narcissism or jingoism. Those songs succeed by illustrating how people rationalize their own monstrosity. These are the Randy Newman songs that get the most ink, because they demand the highest level of critical intervention.

And people just love to intervene in those songs. Many years ago, in college, I took a class on vernacular American humor, and I wrote a paper on “Rednecks,” and specifically about how the song shifts in the middle from the redneck perspective (“Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show / With some smart-ass New York Jew”) to a broader social critique that implicates that redneck perspective (Newman lists all the urban ghettos in which African-Americans are “free to be put in a cage”). The teacher was a grad student who had long hair and glasses and cited Lyotard in casual conversation. I don’t remember a tremendous amount about the class, but I do know that it seemed at times labored, if well-intentioned, and that it cured me of thinking too much about Newman’s comic mechanism. As much as I enjoy his most Mephistophelean rhetorical moves (it’s difficult to overestimate the pleasure of a surgical strike like “I Just Want You To Hurt Like I Do,” in which Newman lays bare one of the most basic of human needs), I leave it to others to compare him with Twain and Stephen Foster and Melville’s Confidence Man. I leave it to others to speculate on what it meant for Newman, in 1970, to sing the explicitly racist “Underneath the Harlem Moon” (which posits a sentimental brand of racism, but racism nonetheless) or, for that matter, to release “Yellow Man” during the Vietnam War. I leave it to others to investigate how these songs do or don’t dovetail with Newman’s own (rare) exploration of his own ethnic identity, which is treated most explicitly on the Land of Dreams album. What I’ll do, instead, is list a few reasons I’m thankful for Newman and his talent. I’m thankful that he loves a wide variety of American music, blues and jazz and ragtime and gospel and country. I’m thankful for the way he fuses melodic sophistication and lyrical intelligence, and for the fact that many of his songs are standards in their time thanks to the interpretations of brilliant singers like Dusty Springfield, Harry Nilsson, and Tim O’Brien. I’m thankful that he can be, within the span of a few songs, viciously sarcastic and unapologetically sentimental. And finally, I’m thankful that despite his erudition and eclecticism, he remains a disciple of one of the two or three most beautiful things in rock and roll, the Fats Domino triplet. I picked three songs that span the range of his talent: the epically insecure "Maybe I'm Doing It Wrong," in which he admits that he's not getting the most out of sex (the best line, "sometimes I throw off a good one," also works as a description of songwriting); the driving "Gone Dead Train" (representative in that it's from a soundtrack, unrepresentative in that it'll blow the doors off your car or home); and the lovely "Rollin'" (probably his most beautiful song, though it’s hard to vote against “Louisiana 1927” or “Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield” or even “Sail Away,” which is like the Hope Diamond of cynicism).

I have interviewed him a few times, and his songwriting style translates perfectly to conversation: bookish, laconic, careful with big thoughts and quick with one-liners. He’s been self-deprecating and also slyly dismissive of Bono, and it’s hard to argue with either of those stances. One of the things he said the first time I spoke with him has stuck with me over the years: he said that no one really gets better as they get older, but that if your work stays at the same level, more or less, that’s a victory. I think he’s right, and right about himself: even though his last album, Harps and Angels, was at times too clangorous for me and at other times too theatrical, there are still instantly canonical songs like “Only a Girl,” a little confection about a May-December romance that ends with a thud as the narrator realizes that his girlfriend might love him for his money. What Newman is in that song, and what he’s always been to me, is a
light. Sometimes it’s a winking light. Sometimes it’s a cold light. Sometimes it’s a sad light at the dying of the day. But everything he makes has candlepower. Not that there's anything wrong with your Loudon Wainwrights and your Lyle Lovetts and your Christine Lavins and your John Prines and your Stephin Merritts and your Eminems. But humor in music—not simply comedy, but humor, the kind that cuts deep and saves the blood that comes out of the wound—has only one shamash.

Download:

"Maybe I'm Doing It Wrong" mp3
by Randy Newman, 1972.
available on Sail Away

"Gone Dead Train" mp3
by Randy Newman, 1970.
available on Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman

"Rollin'" mp3
by Randy Newman, 1974.
available on Good Old Boys


********************************

This is the first of eight posts at the Boogie Woogie Flu, in which eight Jewish writers will discuss the works of other Jewish artists for eight consecutive days in celebration of Hanukkah.

Electric Worrier

by Ben Greenman

Marc Bolan, of course, was the front man and principal songwriter for T. Rex, both in the band’s early hippie incarnation (Tyrannosaurus Rex, which evolved out of the psychedelic folk ensemble John’s Children) and in its later, more successful glam-rock version. You know T. Rex, of course, from “Bang a Gong (Get It On),” which went top ten in 1972 and the band’s only American hit. In Britain, though, Bolan and T. Rex were a rock-and-roll phenomenon who repeatedly rose into the top five with songs like “Hot Love,” “Jeepster,” “Metal Guru,” “Telegram Sam.” Bolan was the original glam superstar, with glitter on his cheeks and a particularly phallic V guitar. He was also Jewish.

It is perhaps gimmicky to end a paragraph with that sentence, because that implies significance, and it’s not clear that Bolan’s Judaism had any. Bolan was born Mark Feld to a truck driver named Simeon and a housewife named Phyllis, and though he was raised Jewish, he was technically a half-Jew, and not the kind that counts. (Bolan’s father, the truck driver, was the Jew, which is odd to begin with—truck driving isn’t in the top ten of Favorite Jewish Professions). Bolan’s lyrics ranged far and wide, into both earthy realms (lust and sex; the “vampire for your love” of “Jeepster”) and unearthly realms (nearly half of the 1972 album “The Slider” takes place in space), but they rarely seemed Jewish. And when Bolan’s mother visited a psychic after his death, the subject of his faith never even came up once.

And yet, if you scratch the surface, Bolan was a prototypical Jewish rock star. He trafficked in outrageous behavior, but from behind a disguise (see David Lee Roth). He assimilated completely, changing his name, like Robert Zimmerman before him or Chaim Witz after him. Finally, T. Rex’s music was almost liturgical in character: impossible to understand, easy to sing along with. In that spirit, I’m offering three T. Rex covers by Jewish artists: Paul Westerberg and the Replacements with a boozy “20th Century Boy,” Richard Hell (born Richard Meyers) and Dim Stars with a sharp “Rip Off,” and Kramer (born Mark Kramer) with a creepy “Get It On” that includes the creepiest of all pop-music ingredients, the children's choir. Only the last of these is explicitly figured as Jewish, appearing as it does on the Bolan installment of Tzadik Records’ “Great Jewish Music” series. The other two are Jewish only by implication, though the “move like a cat, talk like a rat” line in “20th Century Boy” has an uncomfortable echo of the Nazi propaganda film “The Eternal Jew.”

On September 16, 1977—a few days after Rosh Hashanah—Bolan got into a purple Mini driven by the singer Gloria Jones, his girlfriend, and never got out. The car struck a tree on Queens Ridge, Barnes, in southwest London. Jones broke her arm and her jaw. Bolan lost his life. Is it a coincidence that Bolan’s age when he died, twenty-nine and then some, almost exactly equaled the average length of a month in the traditional Jewish lunisolar calendar? Probably.

Download:

"20th Century Boy" mp3
by The Replacements, 1984.
available on Let It Be

"Rip Off" mp3
by Dim Stars, 1992.
available on Dim Stars

"Get It On" mp3
by Kramer, 1998.
available on Great Jewish Music: Marc Bolan

*****************

"Ride A White Swan" mp3
by T. Rex, 1970
available on T. Rex

"Monolith" mp3
by T. Rex, 1971.
available on Electric Warrior

"Life's A Gas" mp3
by T. Rex, 1971.
available on Electric Warrior

"Metal Guru" mp3
by T. Rex, 1972.
available on The Slider

Record Store Day 2009

Today is the second annual Record Store Day. This is a day for music lovers. Sure, the economy is shot. The record business is too, but that was started long ago by the creeps running record labels who have increasingly become not music lovers, but businessmen with bad ideas. There are exceptions of course, but not enough of them.

This is what I had to say last year and I think it's worth repeating today:

Record stores, while rapidly diminishing are still a great source of pleasure for music lovers everywhere. They have a smell. Downloading is easy, but it's impersonal. Even though most of you are here to do just that. Instead of plying you with a bunch of compressed mp3's, I urge you to go out and buy something today. Something that you can hold in your hands, with writing on the back and pictures or a booklet with all kinds of information and artwork to peruse while you listen to it. Go to a real record store, not Walmart or the Virgin Megastore if you can help it. Go somewhere and look around. Buy something on a whim. Buy something because you like the cover. Buy something because someone told you it's good or it has a funny title. Take a chance. Go buy one of the records you heard here or somewhere else. I can tell you where I bought most of the records in my collection, because record stores are fun...

Record stores are important too. People that run them and work in them know stuff that you don't. There are celebrations and instore performances taking place everywhere today.

If you are in Phoenix, Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets is playing at Zia Records. In Nashville, Charlie Louvin and Del McCoury are gonna be at Grimeys. Jay Reatard is at Goner in Memphis. Mark Olson and Gary Louris from the Jayhawks are at Waterloo in Austin, I'm gonna go listen to a preview of the new Dylan record at Other Music in New York City today. Bill Callahan is playing there later too. In St Louis, the Bottle Rockets are playing at Euclid Records, one of my favorite places, and they're also unveiling the latest of their exclusive 7" singles by none other than NRBQ's Terry Adams. Make sure you tell Euclid owner Joe Schwab happy birthday. John Paul Keith & The One Four Fives are at the Disc Exchange in Knoxville, and Wilco are gonna be there signing autographs. There's tons of shit happening everywhere, plus it's spring and you should get away from your computer anyway and enjoy the beautiful weather. For more info on Record Store Day, go HERE.


****************************************************

I wasn't gonna post anything to download today, but I do have one thing to offer up. This is an unlikely collaboration between Swamp Dogg and friend of Fluville, Ben Greenman. Ben is a writer at The New Yorker, co-proprietor of Moistworks, and the author of several books. His latest novel, Please Step Back, is the fictional story of a soul singer named Rock Foxx, troubled and living San Francisco in the late sixties and early seventies. Ben wrote some lyrics to an unrecorded Rock Foxx song for the novel, and asked Jerry Williams (AKA Swamp Dogg) if he would like to compose some music and record it. And he did.

Here's what Ben had to say about it...

"The song is pretty important in the book because it's all about verticality. He gets high often because, well, he has a problem, and he's always seeking ground -- solid ground, and personal rootedness. But in the song, he's trying to make sense of it. It's all about gravity and bounce and birds. Things that affect the vertical. As Swamp Dogg was making his song I also made a horrendous 30-second version myself, which was how I imagined Rock Foxx would sing it -- slow, draggy, and druggy. Since I can't sing and there were no instruments, it was a super-raw demo. I destroyed it immediately. I'm glad I did, because it was horrendous, but I have it somewhere in my head, and it helps me see what a great job Swamp Dogg did with the song."

For more of the backstory on this great and unusual collaboration, go to Largehearted Boy.

Download:

"Please Step Back" mp3
by Swamp Dogg, 2009.
via Largehearted Boy

Okay, now go out and buy a Swamp Dogg record. I suggest Total Destruction To Your Mind or Rat On! Buy anything that tickles your fancy. Just get out and support your local record dealer. Have fun, and if you feel like it, let me know what you picked up today in the comments below.

If you live on the West Coast, Ben Greenman is going to be reading at some of the finer bookstores out there in the next few weeks. We'll save the dilemma of bookstores for another post.

****************************************************

top photograph: © Ted Barron
Del-Pen Market, St. Louis, Missouri, 1986.

Hey! Juden

by Ben Greenman

What do you call a fact that you know but constantly forget? There are facts like this. It's almost as though they are covered with a substance that makes it impossible to hold on to them, some kind of epistemological no-stick coating. Each person probably has facts that function this way on an individual basis: maybe it's your mother's birthday or where your niece is going to college or the actual job title your sister has now, after her promotion from whatever her job title used to be. Universal Teflon Facts are rarer, but there is at least one: there are Jewish Beatle kids.

To be more precise, there are four Jewish Beatle kids. Their names are Heather, Mary, Stella, and James. They are Jewish, by Jewish law, because Paul McCartney, the blood father of Mary, Stella, and James – and the adoptive father of Heather – married Linda Louise Eastman. Linda was Jewish. This very short sentence may require repeated applications, not because it is so outlandish, but because Linda's Jewishness seems to have been almost entirely overlooked in most accounts of the Beatles. Linda was not especially religious, but she was especially Jewish. Her father, the entertainment lawyer Lee Eastman, was born Leopold Epstein. Her mother, Louise Sara Lindner Eastman, was an heiress to the Lindner department store fortune. Paul McCartney married a Jewish woman. Paul McCartney's children are Jewish. Read it again. While plenty of members of the Beatles circle were Jewish—Brian Epstein and Sid Bernstein, for starters—none of them was married to a Beatle. The relatively narrow document "Jews and the Beatles" mentions Linda, but only briefly. Stella McCartney, who is now a famous clothing designer, has discussed her religion: "My Mum was Jewish. Maybe I'm a really bad Jew because I'm always so excited to say that I am , but I don't live and breathe the religion." The other McCartneys have not, at least publicly.

Linda was not just a Jewish woman, of course. She was a devoted mother and a loving (and beloved) partner. She was also a recording artist of rare distinction. Her recorded legacy, collected on the 1992 album Wild Prairie, is one of the most powerful monuments of romantic love, right up there with the Taj Mahal. Listen to it for a minute and you'll hear why: without love, there's simply no way these recordings would exist. They would have been erased and then erased again, just to be sure that they were gone. Calling them terrible is an insult to terrible things. Listening to Linda proceed tunelessly through "Endless Days" (she "sings" the "song" the way that Ken Lay "protected employees" or Ryan Leaf "quarterbacked") is an experience to be treasured, if by treasured you mean buried in a chest by pirates. She makes the Shaggs look like Mozart, each and every one of them. She records the Coasters' immortal "Poison Ivy" and, well, let's just say it's not immortal anymore.

This doesn't mean that Linda was a bad person, of course. By all accounts she was a wonderful one. It doesn't even mean she was a cosseted billionaire: the recordings weren't released during her lifetime, and putting them out after her death was hardly the most irrational thing that Paul McCartney did in his attempt to deal with his bottomless grief (cf. marrying Heather Effing Mills). It just means that she was an abysmally bad singer with no real sense of melody and rhythm, no pleasing tone, no nothing. Lots of us are horrendous singers. And yet, on an album full of abysmal songs, one stands out as even more preposterous than the rest. In 1973, Paul and Linda found themselves in Lagos, Nigeria, working on the new Wings new album. The sessions were highly collaborative and communal. James Coburn dropped by! Linda brought a song named "Oriental Nightfish." She sang lead and played piano. Paul added guitar, bass, drums, and Mellotron. The always-helpful Denny Lane pitched in on flute.

"Oriental Nightfish" is not much to speak of. It's a trifle, and a trifle odd, one of those songs that people say is "ahead of its time" because five or six years later better musicians and better singers would attempt better things that sound vaguely similar if you don't pay attention. In fact, it is behind its time, because it--like the rest of this record--would have been better served by a world without recording equipment. The plot involves Linda's glimpsing of a wonderfully strange creature. There are lyrics that she recites more than sings (this is what is known as a small favor) and I have reprinted them below in their entirety:

It was a Thursday night
I was working late
When I first caught sight
Of the Oriental nightfish

The colors were swirling
The room was getting hotter
I couldn't see anything

Emerald, blue, purple, red
I was working late
It was a Thursday night
When I first caught sight
Of the Oriental nightfish fish fish fish fish
Nightfish (fish fish fish fish)

Linda's husband, who was in the Beatles for a time, wrote some pretty senseless lyrics in his time, from "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" to "Spies Like Us" "Biker Like an Icon." Still, it is not possible that he saw any merit in "Oriental Nightfish." Despite that, Paul and Linda, along with the animator Ian Emes, even made a highly trippy short film based on the song in 1978 (it is available on YouTube and has about as much merit as the recording, though with just enough animated nudity to keep viewers awake). Some people have suggested that it's a savage swipe at Yoko Ono. Those people are giving it too much credit. In light of Linda's heritage, in light of Hanukah, I give you, the world, a special gift in the form of permission to retitle this song in your minds. From henceforth it shall be known as "Oriental Whitefish."

Download:

"Oriental Nightfish" mp3
by Linda McCartney, 1973.
available on Wide Prairie

"Poison Ivy" mp3
by Linda McCartney, 1973.
available on Wide Prairie

"Endless Days" mp3
by Linda McCartney, 1973.
available on Wide Prairie