Elijah Wald's New Book

Elijah Wald has been performing music and writing about it for awhile, and our paths have crossed recently a couple of times, first at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in Mexico City, and then again in Pittsburgh, when he came through on his book tour and I was alerted by mutual friends and went down to hear him. We had a little public discussion about the dearth of opportunities for live performance these days—that’s another story—and I picked up a copy of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (here's the amazon page). Elijah was pretty straightforward about the title being chosen for commercial intent, but every single reviewer on Amazon, for example, slagged him for it nevertheless. Having gotten through the book myself, I’m not against the title; his primary thesis IS that the Beatles, once they removed themselves from the multi-ethnic, dance-driven soup that had always been American popular music, DID change the way popular music was incubated and (not) performed. One of the consequences was virtually the end of interracial bills. He cites Woodstock as an example, with the only two black performers being Greenwich Village folkie Richie Havens and fresh-off-the-boat-with-his-limey-rhythm-section Jimi Hendrix.. I take that back, I’d seen him opening for the Rascals in Central Park in 1967 when he WAS fresh off the boat (and actually exchanged a few words and a handshake with him at the Fillmore East). Woodstock was 1969—Linda and I probably flew over it on our way to Europe for 10 years. Hendrix was dead little more than a year later.

Not to get distracted: Wald traces the history of American popular music when performance and recording opportunities were virtually segregated, but when influences still flowed freely across racial and ethnic divides. One of his key arguments is in favor of the Paul Whiteman legacy, who, as he points out, tends to be dismissed by hard-core jazz critics, while being cited favorably by many jazzers themselves, including Duke Ellington, for his orchestral approach to jazz big-band performance, his commercial success, and his introduction of vocalists (including Bing Crosby).

He also does a careful job of parceling out the credit for the beginnings of rock and roll, including Chuck Berry, Elvis, and Carl Perkins and emphasizing that none of them were working in isolation. Another of Wald’s primary points is that—contrary to the rock historians’ preferred narrative, rock and roll, then rock, did not manage a scorched-earth entry onto the popular music scene: do-wop, crooners, Motown, Chubby Checker and many others shared the charts throughout the Sixties. It was in the aftermath of Sargent Pepper that the album-oriented FM format (and others) started to devolve into today’s atomized media formats and audiences.

Whatever you think of this thesis—and Wald stops there, other than a few marginal references to later developments like hip hop—the book itself is a thoroughly researched and carefully written history that dislodges some comfortable assumptions about popular music, rebuilding its story into a much more complex mosaic.

Kingston Stories

In the summer of 2007, I went to Kingston, Jamaica for a meeting of the Association for Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus just outside of Kingston. I was inspired to do this by a proposed panel on international hip hop involving Tony Mitchel (Global Noise), Bronwen Low from McGill and several others I had met in Mexico city the previous year at another conference. Another big factor was the personal encouragement I got from Kingston resident and popular music scholar Dennis Howard, whom I’d met and bonded with in Mexico City as well. As a longtime reggae fan, I felt like the notion of a personal visit to Trenchtown had some existential validity. Here’s Dennis and I in front of the national stadium and statue of Jamaican track legend Don Quarrie. Jamaica's national soccer team, whose team name is the Reggae Boyz, also plays here.

Island music has been intertwined with American and European popular music at least since the mambo craze of the 40s and 50s, but for boomers like me, it was Bob Marley and Chris Blackwell’s Island Records that brought it to the front of my consciousness in the late 60s with the reggae, rocksteady and ska styles. Blackwell was born a Londoner, but grew up in Jamaica and was able to parlay his familiarity with the local music scene into an enormously successful independent label which ended up back in London (where I spent a night in their studios in 1978 recording some demos).


Needless to say, Blackwell was long gone from Kingston in 2007 and the Trenchtown area didn’t have much going on in terms of music, and most of the commercial activity was informal. Dennis and Peter Tosh’s former manager Herbie Miller gave me a tour, which included meeting Dennis' father in his store, taking a few pictures in front of the Bob Marley statue, and cruising by the locations of famous studios and outdoor concert locations in the early reggae era. Herbie had perfectly plausible visions of turning the area into a tourist destination based on reggae stars and history. (See here for an update on that initiative.)

Live music in Kingston is pretty weak, right now, however, with the combination of sound systems and dancehall taking up most of that space. A sound system can get your attention: on weekends the parties in open spaces can be heard for blocks; when the legendary Stone Love system arrived in a dump truck and set up on campus, the massive subwoofers brought people out of buildings for a half-mile around, and made you question your bowel control.

Kingston itself has a reputation for violence, with more razor wire in evidence than is comfortable. My hotel told me to take a cab up to the Hilton for a drink; I looked out the door and it was 50 yards away. I walked. Most tourists to Jamaica end up on the north coast at Ocho Rios or Montego bay. Kingston draws more intrepid tourists but the city’s infrastructure isn’t strong, public transport inconsistent, and movement after dark needs to be cautious. Like many major cities, major capital has attempted to avoid inner-city constraints by building from scratch outside the center (think La Défense in Paris, Greenwich outside of London, Puebla in Mexico City), but New Kingston, as Dennis pointed out, was poorly planned, neglecting basic things like parking. The small maquiladora sector has now moved entirely to Asia and the economic base of the country was faltering even before the international crisis hit, with both sugar and tourism having problems.

This kind of an environment often puts the onus on the individual, and Dennis is no exception. As he completes his graduate work, he continues to run a production / event planning company with his partner, Jackie, which includes a gorgeous property up on Blue Mountain where a bunch of us were hosted for a meal at the conference end. In the meantime, he’s an accomplished scholar already, with his academic training buttressed by hands-on experience with many of the greats of Jamaican music. His blog is a must-stop for people interested in that history.

Think Local, Act Global

Got a note from Anneliefs Brown the other day, drumming up support for a band from Soweto that she manages. She’s Dutch, by the way… She and the band are hoping to leverage Internet power to pre-finance a new recording. A certain number of artists are doing this these days, some very successfully. If you want to contribute, or just see how they’re doing, go to the band's page at the Africa Unsigned website.

For people following social media trends, this hardly raises an eyebrow. If it works it will be, however, extraordinary. Not in terms of the Internet powering the experiment, but rather in terms of the intercontinental, cross-cultural component of the whole thing. From where I sit in the US, most of the social networking seems to be among like-minded souls, which in music means there are really high language and culture barriers. The chances of the hipsters from Chicago or Atlanta signing on to the latest Argentine hip-hop act or indie rock band are actually infinitesimal, in spite of their easy availability. There is what the French call a certain amount of nombrilisme (belly-button gazing) in the whole scene, where ever-more-obscure acts from Omaha break big in social media, but mostly from the same subculture: white, English-speaking, over-educated, under-employed.

But hey, prove me wrong! Support local live music, then follow my $10 to Africa Unsigned…

The Listening Room

Listening and popular music don’t necessarily go together. This was brought home to me again when (my wife) Linda and I were attempting to listen to a fine set by a young Pittsburgh singer-songwriter named Brooke Annibale at the Club Café. We had gotten there later than we should have, and found seats at the bar. Before long it became clear that a multi-generational group between us and the stage were not there for the music—turning their backs to the stage and raising their voices as the music began. In that Pittsburgh’s Carson Street on the South Side is home to dozens of bars without the annoyance of music and that there was a $7 cover charge to get in to the Club Café, it was a bit puzzling as to why a dozen or so people were intent on ruining the experience of the 90% of the room who were listening. Does this make the Club Café exceptionally bad in this regard? No, it’s the best room in Pittsburgh outside of concert halls for listening to music.

The notion of listening to popular music is a recent one. Popular music, even folk music, has had as a primary function providing a sound track for other activities, mostly dancing and socializing, throughout its history. When what is now known as classical music was “popular,” that was its function as well. Virtually every musical genre you could think of began life as a dance music (see Elijah Wald’s new book How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll for a real nice history—more on this later). Somewhere in the 60s, when jazz became “America’s classical music” (as NPR endlessly reminds us), FM album-oriented formats flourished, folk made it to the concert hall, and Sergeant Pepper and Dylan came along to intellectualize rock ‘n roll, listening became a common experience. Listening rooms included rock clubs with tables, coffee houses, and all the showcase clubs up and down Bleeker Street in New York. Not much left of any of that: the tables have come out of the rock clubs, the coffee houses are gone, and the Bleeker St. clubs offer a continuous stream of artists playing short nameless sets for $5 entry. At least there’s some money involved: Austin’s Sixth Street and Nashville’s Broadway offer mostly top-notch musicians playing for tips.

My personal experience includes playing the UK folk circuit in the 70s, mostly composed of the back rooms of pubs, but where people paid a few quid to listen attentively to the locals and to the traveling featured performer. As a listener my recent high points have come at the BlueBird café in Nashville and at the Mississippi Studios in Portland, Oregon. The BlueBird, particulary, showcases the wealth of Nashville songwriting talent (and you pay to get in). On a column opposite the front door (the actual place is in a strip mall) is the admonishment (S-s-s-h-h-h!). The room takes listening very seriously and enforces its no-talking rule. Mississippi Studios until recently was run by a cooperative (like Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs now is)) and was set up with pews and folding chairs—and a huge sound system.. All these are exceptional now. A dominant form of supplying entertainment for drinkers now is the “open stage” where unpaid performers play to indifferent audiences talking as loudly as they need to make themselves heard.

There is an argument to be made that the most common listening environment at the moment is the space between two earbuds. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to find a space where people are listening to popular music and support it. Or start one yourself…

Liverpool 2009

In my academic life, I spent a week in Liverpool last summer at the meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. This was my second; the previous one was in Mexico City. The conference is lots of people who approach the eccentric and the mundane in the music world from all sorts of points of view--perfect for someone like me who finds something to like in almost all musical expression.

In the meantime, Liverpool was hoppin. The city itself has had its ups and downs, the Beatles notwithstanding. It was the port from whence the Titanic sailed. When it and another couple of major vessels went to the bottom, a large portion of the adult male population of Liverpool went with them. Those hard times are not forgotten, but the city is thriving. A large chunk of it is pedestrian now, and like many European cities, the public transportation is good. (A lot of it could be a model for Pittsburgh, my home town). Wandering through exhibits and the neighborhood where the Cavern sits, it's pretty obvious that Liverpool has been turning out musicians by the truckload, both before and since the Merseybeat. There is a small industry in Beatles memorabilia and tribute bands, one of which I saw at the Cavern on a Saturday night. I knew it was a tribute band, and the site of the room wasn't quite original, and that everyone in the room were Beatles tourists from around the world, but it still gave me the chills.

The main gathering point for us was a pub called Hannah's: three stories with gourmet cooking and marginal beer--exactly the reverse of the fabulous beer and marginal cooking of the Seventies. Two or three musical acts at all times; the number of venues in town was pretty stunning. Of course there were a lot of DJ dance bars too--Liverpudlians have always partied hard, and there is now an Island-wide trend among a certain age group to drink until you fall down. I also heard about the proliferation of music festivals in UK and on the continent--exponential numbers with local festival cultures renewed from year to year. I was staying with my friend Dennis Howard from Kingston (more later) so got caught up on reggae happening in Jamaica at the same time.

Recording then and now

Winter in Pittsburgh. I'm finishing off the mixing of the album in the home studio--amazing what is available to songwriters these days. It does take me back to other recording experiences, notably the first serious recording I did--for Bill Leader and Transatlantic Records in the U.K. Bill had a studio up in the Yorkshire Dales, with a wall of windows looking out over the valley. We got there the night before sessions were to start, and went out for a bite and a pint at a pub up on a hill. It was my brother Jeff, my touring partner Mick Linnard, and drummer Pick Withers (in a little known band called Dire Straits). The local brew was heavenly and the standard closing time of 11 PM meant only that they locked the doors and drew the curtains--if you were inside at the time you could stay. The end result was that we were all a bit sullen the next day starting out. We got over it, and the sessions were great fun. Bill's wife Helen fed us and it was a collective experience quite different from the digital domain, where these days Bill's tools (and more) are in my own hands. Bill was a pioneer, recording many British folk legends, including Bert Jansch, and it was a great privilege to work with him. We shared production responsibilities, and Jeff did some arranging for the strings we played ourselves. Pretty low-key, but the folk-club circuit was supporting a lot of musicians at the time (as long as you weren't fiscally ambitious). But more on that later...