It’s been a busy summer at the magazine. We spent much of it on the road, taking in various music festivals, an awe-inspiring songwriting camp, and the music scenes of two Oklahoma cities.
After the dust settled on Bonnaroo in June, in nearby Manchester, Tennessee, we headed north on I-65 to Louisville, Kentucky for a weekend of revelry and music on the banks of the Ohio River at Forecastle Fest. There we caught some of the best live rock acts at work today: bands like Arcade Fire and the War on Drugs, as well as Houndmouth, from next-door New Albany, Indiana, whom we profile in this issue.
Beckoned by the spirit of Woody Guthrie, we then headed west to Oklahoma and submerged ourselves in the newly bourgeoning Tulsa music scene. With the excellence of acts like John Moreland, John Fullbright, Parker Millsap, and the Turnpike Troubadours leading the charge, the songwriting talent that’s emerged from the Sooner State in recent years has been nothing short of staggering.
In Tulsa, writer Lynne Margolis found a music community that is inclusive and close-knit. There all manner of collaborations are happening, and they are happening across genres. Fullbright, a pure singer-songwriter in the vein of fellow Okie Jimmy Webb, has found himself broadening his musical palette and playing regularly with jam bands and hardcore honky-tonk acts, something he never imagined happening before moving to Tulsa. There are also flocks of musicians and artists relocating to the city as they get priced out of long-standing music citadels like Austin and Nashville. In Nashville, the average one-bedroom apartment now goes for about $1,800 per month in the city’s urban core, while the income required to “live comfortably” in Music City shot to roughly $80,000 in 2018, according to a study by the personal finance website GoBankingRates.com. To put this in perspective, the average salary of a Nashville musician hovers at the $40,000 mark. (Source: payscale.com). It has become clear that the once-reliable bohemian outposts are no longer sustainable for the working creative class, so expect new scenes that will incubate the country’s best art and music to take root in the next decade.
After kicking around Tulsa for as long as we could, we Kerouac-ed out to Big Sur country and landed in Carmel, California for Rodney Crowell’s inaugural songwriting camp. The country and Americana veteran is regarded as a master of the craft, and nearly 100 students made the journey from all over the States, even Europe in some cases, to join him and a cast of instructors that included Bernie Taupin of Elton John songwriting fame, Joe Henry, and Lisa Loeb, among others. The camp focused not so much on how to write hit songs but how to write great ones. Crowell, a native Texan and disciple of Guy Clark during his salad days in 1970s Nashville, stressed hard rhymes and was forthright with his criticism, noting that he too had learned in that fashion. Having suffered the slings and arrows of the music business in a career that spans nearly 40 years, Crowell stressed the importance of perseverance and weathering failure — something he said happens more than success.
For this issue’s cover story, Marissa R. Moss goes behind the aviators and shines a light on the creative process and business approach of Eric Church, whose new album and best work to date, Desperate Man, comes out next month. Church, of course, is somewhat anomalous in the mainstream country music realm because of his album-oriented approach. He is also a fan-centric artist, not unlike the Phishes and Widespread Panics of the jam-band world, and a tireless road warrior. Church had a hand in writing all of the album’s tracks, and as Ray Wylie Hubbard, one of Texas’s most effective left-of-center wordsmiths, relates to Moss, Church is first and foremost a songwriter. Such auteurship is certainly rare in mainstream country.
There’s a lot more in this issue, including a chat with blues great Buddy Guy, whose latest album is titled The Blues Is Alive And Well. The guitar still sizzles and Mick and Keith show up for cameos as Guy pays homage to his fallen blues brothers of yesteryear.
“When I started,” Guy says, in explanation of the album’s title, “I was competing with all these greats like Otis Rush, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and B.B. King. They all told me, ‘Whoever’s left has to keep the blues alive.’ Now they’re all gone, so it’s up to me.”
As Guy’s words remind us, batons must be passed in order to keep the best of our heritage alive as we move forward into an anxious and uncertain age.
Iggy Pop once said, “Rock and roll is a solution to tragedy.” While discussing his 1982 memoir I Need More, the rock icon went on to say of the art form that it’s about “a small hunting and gathering group, anthropologically speaking, of young men who get together out of nothing more than sheer desperation and go for it in a small town. Everybody knows this, from the Stones down.”
It’s an interesting theory, and one I believe to be true. At this year’s Bonnaroo, when the Tennessee rock band Paramore played the main stage on Friday afternoon, Iggy’s words rushed to mind when lead vocalist Hayley Williams addressed the subject that had become the topic of much conversation among the crowd. That morning, festival attendees had awakened to the news of the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, the world-travelling celebrity chef with the rock and roll persona, who was also, unsurprisingly, a serious music enthusiast. It was another grim chapter in our nation’s lengthening book of grim news.
“We live in a really strange time, and it’s very dark,” Williams said late in the band’s set. “Every day you wake up, and you don’t know what the news is gonna be. And most of the time, it’s not great. This morning, it was really hard yet again to wake up and see another suicide in the entertainment industry, but most of all, just in the human race. We’re all people coexisting, or we should be, just trying to get through. And I want you to take one moment to be present enough to realize that you’re surrounded by people that you may never see again, but for some reason, we all came here today. No matter what you’re going through, I know this doesn’t make it go away, but just for one second, let’s be present and enjoy music, and dance!”
Paramore’s performance, and Williams’ words, encapsulatedthe Bonnaroo experience in 2018. Much of the band’s set cribbed from its latest album, After Laughter, a record born of desperation in which Williams addresses her struggle with mental health, the band’s almost career-ending inner turmoil, and the initiation into the realities of adulthood. Despite the often-difficult subject matter, the music itself is dance-worthy pop-punk with pulsing Afrobeat grooves, at once jubilant and defiant. The lyrics might knock you down, but the music lifts you up, as it did the crowd that Friday afternoon.
At first glance, Bonnaroo looks like a monument to neo-hippie millennial hedonism. And to some degree, it is. But in this age of increasing social isolation, gun violence, systemic opioid abuse, pervasive sexual assault and, for many, political despair, Bonnaroo in many ways represents the best the culture has to offer. Eighty thousand music lovers peacefully coexisting and having fun in a field on a Tennessee farm.
What the festival provides, above all else, is a chance to experience community, if only for moment, over the course of four days and nights. The advent of streaming and the ubiquity of music have changed the way we consume it. Listening, for the most part, has become more of an isolationist act and a background experience. But going to festivals, and seeing live music in your hometown, is a great way to deeply engage and be part of something positive.
Since Bonnaroo began, we’ve seen the festival experience become part and parcel of popular music culture. In that time, we’ve witnessed festivals like Forecastle, a more localized version of Bonnaroo that goes down on the banks of the Ohio River in downtown Louisville, take root. To our collective benefit, all manner of highly curated boutique festivals have sprung up. Wildwood Revival outside of Athens, Georgia resembles a laid-back Southern hang more than anything else, so, from the immense productions to more intimate gatherings, there is something for everyone.
Summer is the high season for touring, and if festivals aren’t your thing, there are a lot of great acts making their way across the country right now, including some of those featured in these pages, like Courtney Barnett, Milk Carton Kids, Shakey Graves and Kacey Musgraves, our cover star who is currently on the road with British pop behemoth Harry Styles. Musgraves’ new album Golden Hour represents a fresh, green take on country music, with elements of disco and pop set to her always sharp songwriting. Her live show is uplifting, and quite the party, too, so don’t miss it.
— from the editor’s note of the July/August 2018 edition
Sturgill Simpson turned 40 years old at Bonnaroo on Friday night. “If this is my mid-life crisis, it’s pretty fucking dope,” he told the crowd shortly into his set on the What Stage as the sun was going down in Manchester, Tennessee.
Wearing a black T-shirt that read “Who The Fuck Is Asking?” — an exercise in meta-merchandising, to be sure (see video below) — Simpson strode onto stage with his four-piece band and kicked into “Welcome To Earth (Pollywog),” the lead track from 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide To Earth.
The tune’s studio version boasts orchestral flourish, but Simpson’s current lineup is decidedly bare bones, and the song’s raw and stripped-down treatment gave the tune, a valentine to his first-born son, an added poignancy. Simpson, for all his shit-kicking tendencies, comes off as a pretty sentimental guy at times. Friday night’s set featured “The Promise,” the ‘80s love ballad originally done by When In Rome, and William Bell’s Stax soul classic, “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” a tune that has cropped up in his sets for the past three years.
Simpson, in many ways, is the perfect candidate to play Bonnaroo, a festival that tries to appeal to so many corners of popular music. His sound traverses so much of the American music vernacular— country, blues, bluegrass, soul, punk, psychedelia, early rock and roll — the notion of genre is rendered irrelevant.
For his Friday night set, there were no visuals or stagecraft to accompany the band, a rarity for an act on the main stage. It was as if he was trying to drive home the point that it was all about the music, as if anyone needed the reminder.
Simpson’s current band is the same retinue he’s been playing with since guitarist Laur Joamets left the group in early 2017, and features Miles Miller on drums, Chuck Bartels on bass, and Bobby Emmett, who famously toppled his organ on SNL, on keys. Many of the tunes were stretched out Friday night, allowing for extended musical interludes that gave Simpson a chance to pick and shred with unbridled ferocity, and for Emmett to cook up a Booker T.-like musical stew on the Hammond B3.
The set featured several selections from A Sailor’s Guide To Earth, along withMetamodern favorite “Turtles All The Way Down,” a tune, Simpson has said, about his past drug use, and not Stephen Hawking.
Of course, drugs are a common theme at Bonnaroo. At one point during the set, Simpson delivered a PSA, telling the crowd, “Ya’ll be safe out there, we don’t want anybody not waking up.”
The message was apropos. On Friday morning, festival attendees woke up to the news that one man had died the night before (of unknown causes), the first death onsite at the festival in three years. There was also the report of the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, the globe-trekking celebrity chef with the rock and roll persona. A serious music lover, Bourdain’s Nashville episode for Parts Unknown in 2016 featured several prominent Music City musicians, Margo Price and Alison Mosshart among them. Bourdain’s death cast a somber cloud over the day’s proceedings, and Paramore’s Hayley Williams addressed it onstage and the creeping darkness of spirit that seems to be gripping so many. “No matter what you’re going through, I know this doesn’t make it go away, but just for one second,” she said, “let’s be present and enjoy music, and dance!”
It was a message taken to heart.
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The Instagram video below was taken at Forecastle Fest, in Louisville, on July 15, 2017.
During a performance of “Staring At the Sun” at Bridgestone Arena on Saturday night, a song from its 1997 album Pop, images of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville flashed on the jumbo-screen. Young men in Polo shirts brandished Tiki torches and white nationalists with “Make America Great Again” hats waved Confederate flags as Bono crooned the lyrics “Afraid of what you’ll find/ If you take a look inside.”
It was a bit much, even by U2 standards, and an awkward moment for a crowd in party mode and buzzed on Michelob Ultra tallboys.
But U2 has never been afraid of overreaching. They are a caricature of rock star grandiosity, and they’ve always been in on the joke. “This is the moment in our story when it all went to our head, or went to my head,” Bono said at one point, before breaking into “Desire” from 1988’s Rattle and Hum.
Bono revels in pomp and circumstance (this is not a criticism), and U2’s concerts play by their own set of rules. Indeed, along with Springsteen, they are one of the only successful arena rock acts left. Few bands can occupy the stadium turf with such command, and have the catalog to sufficiently carry a two-and-a-half to three- hour show. And though there were moments when the delete button should have been hit in pre-production for this tour (Bono’s “mirror monologues” as his devilish alter-ego MacPhisto were downright cringe-worthy), it was still a riveting performance.
From a sheer production standpoint, the show was an absolute marvel. Two stages flanked opposite ends of the arena, connected by a catwalk that rose and fell throughout the concert. A jumbo widescreen hung suspended over the walkway, projecting all manner of visuals and animation, complimenting the actualities onstage to great effect.
The show was heavy on material from the last two albums, Songs Of Innocence and Songs Of Experience, the fruits of a band knowing what works and what it does well. Portions of Experience were written in the wake of Brexit and the Trump ascendancy, and much of the material amounts to a pep talk and rallying cry for the politically and spiritually broken-hearted. Flashing on the screen throughout the night were hashtag buzz phrases like “end internment,” “collusion is not an illusian [is the “a” intenTonal?]” (huh?), and “poverty is sexist.” The lyrics were less heavy- handed, thankfully.
The intertextual messaging of the concert touched upon other themes, such as Ireland’s struggle for independence, Bono’s childhood and the passing of his mother, and Martin Luther King’s civil rights crusade, which of course came with a performance of “Pride (In The Name of Love).
In Nashville or anywhere else, a U2 show is major public event, and with it comes an attendant celebrity presence. Oprah Winfrey was in the house (which Bono mentioned twice), as was Al Gore, who parted the crowd near the stage pre-show as he made his way to his seat with T Bone Burnett, who, strangely enough, looked more the statesman than Gore.
Surprisingly, the new material received the most inspired treatment of the night, while the old chestnuts (“Beautiful Day,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “One”) came off as tired and uninspired. “American Soul” from Experience was a tight, muscular salvo and showcased a band in fine fettle. Bono’s voice is as strong as it’s been in 20 years, Larry Mullen Jr.’s drumming only gets more athletic as the years pass, and the guitar and bass combo of the Edge and Adam Clayton remains ironclad. Amid the visual spectacle and performative drama it is easy to lose sight of the truth that this set of musical relationships has always been the most remarkable aspect of a U2 performance — viewed up close and watching them work, it is astonishing that a four-on-the-outfit can wield such an imposing wall of iconic sound.
The first week I arrived in Nashville, back in the spring of 2009, I went to eat at Arnold’s Country Kitchen on Eighth Avenue. Nashville was not yet the boomtown it is today, so there was little wait time outside. This is not the case now – on most days, lines of tourists snake out the door.
As I made my way through the buffet line I noticed two men sitting in the corner conversing over lunch. One was Cowboy Jack Clement. The other was John Prine. “That’s not something you see every day,” I thought to myself. The patrons gave them their space and I didn’t notice any requests for a photo or an autograph.
These were the days before Nashville’s culture had begun its precipitous transformation into an entirely new reality. The nearby Gulch neighborhood was still in its relative infancy and the spread of this new Gulchure, with its nouveau-riche and tourist kitsch, articulated through gaudy condos, karaoke bars, pedal taverns and bachelorette parties, had yet to take root, stamping out from the city all but the last vestiges of the bohemian and the offbeat. The culture of the old guard still had a foothold.
The kind of scenes I saw at Arnold’s that day are fewer and further between as more of the old timers, like Cowboy Jack, leave this world for the great beyond, and more of the old haunts close up shop or change beyond recognition. I don’t know what Prine and Cowboy Jack were talking about that day, but I bet it wasn’t real estate.
Prine has always been a man who loafs and invites his soul in the best possible way. He is the Buddha of folk music. He is fond of saying he would rather go out and grab a hot dog than write a song. In our cover story written by Peter Cooper, Prine says he basically had to be forced to finish the album by his wife/manager Fiona and his stepson Jody.
Prine’s debut album, a collection of songs that still stands as one of the greatest debuts in American music, arrived so perfectly formed one wonders if its creation was a case of direct channeling. I saw him play that album in sequence in 2016 at the Station Inn, the little dingy bluegrass club in the heart of the Gulch. It was a special evening. Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires watched on in rapt awe, and yet, Prine is a hero who doesn’t try to act like one. His aw-shucks persona is natural and unaffected and a breath of fresh air in a town dominated by narcissism and attention-seekers and constant Instagram feeds.
The man who wrote “Angel From Montgomery” in his early 20s says he has no idea how songwriting works. At this magazine, we talk a lot about craft, but the great works of the imagination often seem to spring from someplace else, a mysterious and sometimes dark wellspring that offers its delights when it wants to. You can’t teach someone to write, “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes.” We now have robots writing poetry and music through AI algorithms, and nothing against robots, but I don’t think one could ever write, “Funny how an old broken bottle/ looks just like a diamond ring.” Or perhaps more aptly, ever would.
Country singer-songwriter Ashley Monroe, who just recorded a new album with Dave Cobb and is featured in these pages, says she doesn’t know how it works either. Some of the songs from the new record spring from the more difficult chapters of her childhood and attempt to reconcile those dark days.
“I’m not in control of it at all,” she tells Geoffrey Himes. “I get a feeling, and suddenly I have all these ideas I didn’t have three seconds before. I had got back from four days of intense therapy, grieving for my dad, which I had never done properly, and forgiving my mom … things were stirred up … so the songs came pouring out.”
The country group Brothers Osborne echo, whose new album Port St. Joe came out this spring, say they insist on maintaining an open mind when it comes to the creative process. “The more you try to create some sort of formula for songwriting, the harder it becomes, and the more disingenuous your songs become,” says John, the band’s guitarist.
To close this issue, we check in with Ry Cooder as he prepares to release his new album The Prodigal Son. The guitar maestro talks with Paul Zollo about working with his son Joachim and laments the death of sophisticated artistry in so much of the music he hears today. The instant, on-demand digital culture discourages deep and thoughtful listening, Cooder suggests. “Music is fundamental and human,” he says, “but will people lose their ability to appreciate a Beethoven quartet so that Beethoven becomes irrelevant … time well tell.”
It’s a thought worth considering. But there are still music lovers giving Prine deep and thoughtful consideration, and hanging on every relevant word.
The number of full-time, professional songwriters working on Music Row has fallen 80 to 90 percent since 2000, according to songwriting trade association NSAI. That number is not scientific and the claim is somewhat controversial, but NSAI stands by it.
Most of the casualties involved non-performing writers with publishing deals who wrote for country radio. They made their income, or “mailbox money” as it’s called in the trade, from mechanical royalties collected on song sales, as well as royalties generated from the public performance of those songs.
The non-performing songwriter could make a living in the ’90s; indeed, they were boom times on Music Row. The success of Garth Brooks catapulted the entire cosmos of country music into another stratosphere. Albums went platinum left and right, and country music began to rival pop in sales figures. In 1992, a Kentuckian named Billy Ray Cyrus, equipped with an achy-breaky heart and a coif that resembled a coonskin cap, was the top seller across all genres. Because the big country artists of the ‘90s merely co-wrote a fraction of their material, a large number of non-performing songwriters collected a generous share of the compositional royalties.
At the end of the decade the music business changed. In 1999 a rough beast called Napster, founded by two teenagers, began slouching toward Bethlehem. It didn’t take long for the illegal, peer-to-peer file sharing service to make its mark. The next year, for the first time in history, the music industry saw a dip in global record sales.
Then, in 2001, iTunes arrived (with the iPod following shortly thereafter), and legal downloads provided songwriters a royalty rate equal to physical sales, though the sum of those royalties remained a shadow of pre-Napster levels. Apple’s new service ushered in the era of the single download, which killed the album as a business model — but at least consumers were paying for music.
Fast-forward 10 years to the advent of streaming. Spotify, an interactive streaming service that started in Sweden, arrived in the U.S. in 2011 and is currently the number-one service here. The new technology has been a godsend for consumers but it’s paid songwriters next to nothing for their creations.
Some in the music community have embraced the new technology. The three major labels — Universal, Warner, Sony — are now seeing substantial revenue increases as a result. But others decry what they consider to be outright theft.
So now, after years of much hand wringing, something’s finally being done about it. In January, the Copyright Royalty Board announced it was raising mechanical rates for songwriters by 44 percent, the largest increase in history. And the Music Modernization Act, which is being touted as the most sweeping copyright reform in a generation, has been introduced on Capitol Hill. The bill’s creation was the result of hard-fought efforts by NSAI, the National Music Publishers Association, and the Digital Media Association (DiMA), which lobbies on behalf of streaming royalties.
The MMA would create a new entity responsible for paying out mechanical royalties for interactive streaming, replacing what is currently a byzantine system. A marketplace rate standard would also be established, and songwriters would be entitled to at least half of all unclaimed digital mechanicals.
As part of the compromise struck with DiMA, the bill protects the streaming companies from most infringement lawsuits. (In early January, Wixen Music Publishing Inc. filed a $1.6 billion suit against Spotify claiming unpaid royalties.)
As always, the devil is in the details, and though the 100-plus-page bill is largely supported by the songwriting community, some argue that it gives way too much to Big Data (especially where safe harbors are concerned).
Bart Herbison, executive director of NSAI and a huge proponent of the bill, is optimistic it will pass. Though he says we’ll never return to the halcyon days of the ‘90s, he thinks the MMA can recover a small fraction of what’s been lost over the last decade. But even if it becomes law, there’s much more to be done, he says. “We’ve still got to attack consent decrees, and we’ve still got to see some kind of agreeable and meaningful payment system from Facebook and YouTube. There are more battlefronts.”
So sign the petitions, write your congressmen, and keep writing songs.
Victor Cabas, a Rhetoric instructor at Hampden-Sydney College whose ferocious intelligence, unorthodox style in the classroom, and unparalleled sense of humor impacted scores of students through four decades of teaching, died on February 28 at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was 69. The cause was heart failure.
He was one of a kind, as anyone who knew him or took his class can attest. For many years, he taught introductory writing at Hampden-Sydney, which he affectionately referred to as “bonehead English,” and could turn even the most hopeless case into a decent writer.
“The saying is, those who can’t do, teach — but it’s a noble profession,” he once said. He took teaching seriously, and could even remember minute biographical details about individual students from decades prior. He was always turned off by any professor who talked down about their students. The many encomiastic reviews on RateMyProfessor.com are a testament to the esteem in which he was held, with former students praising him as “the best professor on campus,” and one saying “take every class you can from him.”
He was one of the funniest — and most quotable — people you were likely to ever meet. He peppered his classes with stories from a colorful and peripatetic life, stories that might include tales of misadventure in Guatemala, where he once got “stoned in the Biblical sense” by a horde of rock-wielding Mayans in a case of mistaken identity.
A native of Newport News, Virginia, Cabas spent much of his youth in South Carolina, where he attended high school. The son of a highly decorated Air Force Brigadier General, he was something of a military brat as a kid, living in England and Hawaii for a spell. Most of his adult life was spent in Nelson County, Virginia, on a large tract of land in the mountains in a house he built himself with the help of student labor. He raised cattle on the property and enjoyed life there immensely with his many dogs over the years. He never owned a cell phone and his lifestyle seemed to defy the instant, on-demand culture.
In 1970, he earned a B.A. from the University of Virginia, graduating first in his class. At UVa he encountered Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for the first time. The book made such an impression that it inspired him to become an academic.
Cabas was accepted to the University of Virginia School of Law, but, after sitting in on classes as an undergraduate, decided it was like “reading your car manual over and over again.” So he accepted a scholarship at State University of New York at Buffalo, where he wrote his dissertation on the use of meta-drama in Shakespeare’s plays and earned his doctorate in literature in 1974.
In the mid-70’s he began his academic teaching career in the English department at the University of Virginia. He did not put himself up for tenure and started teaching at Hampden-Sydney shortly thereafter in the Rhetoric department. In addition to writing, he taught Shakespeare, Melville, Faulkner, the Civil War, American Blues Music, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, as well as a host of other subjects.
A talented writer, Cabas was putting the finishing touches on a novel called Postmodern Blues when he died. The book, which mostly takes place in Guatemala and Charlottesville during the ’80s, is a madcap roman à clef that recounts his post-divorce days of bacchanalia and hard-drinking, a vice he gave up not long after that. The book is also a blistering satire of academia, but ultimately, it is a tale about the redemptive power of love.
Cabas was also an accomplished blues guitarist, and a serious devotee of the Delta blues singer Robert Johnson, on whom he taught a class at UVa. He performed live music regularly, playing a weekly gig at Basic Necessities in Nelson County for the last 20 years. In the late ’90s, you could find him busking on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, belting out blues tunes by the likes of Son House, Bukka White, and Henry Thomas.
He was an avid vintage guitar collector, and spent the last weekend of his life at a guitar show in South Carolina. In his last decade he found great joy in the camaraderie of the guitar merchant scene.
For all his many gifts, Cabas will perhaps best be remembered by his friends as a generous man of uncommon integrity who lived life on his own terms. He also had the unique ability to find meaning in a seemingly broken world. When once asked what this life was all about it, he simply replied, “Just enjoy yourself and try to do a little good.”
Cabas is survived by his father, Brigadier General (Retired) Victor Nicholas Cabas, Sr., USAF; stepmother, Norma Cabas; and his dogs, Jake and Mojo. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Hospice of Piedmont, Charlottesville, Virginia, or to the Nelson County SPCA, Lovingston, Virginia.
A memorial service will be held at his home on May 5, 2018, at 3 p.m. For more information on the service, please email Caine O’Rear at caineorear@gmail.com. Condolences and remembrances can be mailed to Brig. Gen. Victor Nicholas Cabas, Sr. at 31021 Marne Drive, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA 90275, or e-mailed to ncabas@icloud.com. Funeral Home Services are being provided by Cremation Society of Virginia —Charlottesville.
Editor’s note from American Songwriter’s November/December 2017 issue
The music world was still reeling from the events in Las Vegas when news came across the transom that Tom Petty had died.
It seemed like the universe’s idea of sick joke.
Petty’s death sent shock waves across the music world and his legions of fans. And it came when we were still trying to process news of the worst mass shooting in modern American history, a mind-numbing act that left 59 dead and nearly 550 wounded. The shooting occurred at a country music festival, so, naturally, for the people of Nashville, it hit close to home. There was something so chilling about the affair that no one mentioned the news in our office the day it happened. Such are the times we live in.
And then later that afternoon, I heard an intern say, “Oh man, we lost Tom Petty.” Reports of his death were initially erroneous, as Petty did not actually die until later that night, after suffering cardiac arrest earlier that morning. But we knew the score when the news broke.
What made Petty’s death so shocking was the fact that he’d just completed a mega-successful tour, a 53-show run that celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Heartbreakers’ debut album. We had caught the show in Nashville at Bridgestone Arena, back in April, and Petty and his band were very much in fine form. The energy level was high and he delivered a set that was heavy on the hits, with the audience seemingly singing along to every word. In the frenzy of that moment, it was hard to fathom a world without Petty’s songs in it.
This issue closes with a remembrance of Petty by Paul Zollo, who collaborated with the late songwriter on a book called Conversations With Tom Petty, originally published in 2005. Petty was always suspicious of journalists and kept his cards close to his chest, but with Zollo he was, quite literally, an open book. The Gainesville, Florida native knew he had a gift, but he was also a consummate craftsman, as he revealed to Zollo, working and reworking songs until they were just right. For Petty, songwriting was a calling. Like so many of our great artists, he had no choice but to follow the muse.
And he never lost sight of what makes people fall in love with rock and roll in the first place.
“The secret, really,” he said, “the most important thing, is: Have a good time. Don’t take it too seriously. You’ve got to take it seriously enough that it happens. But don’t let anything throw you … and if you keep it on that level, and be sure you’re enjoying it, then that will carry and they’ll enjoy it … So I always try to enjoy it. And the audience sustains me. That is the truth.”
His appreciation of the audience was not lost on those who loved his music. They always knew they were part of the equation. His shows were a party, and everyone was welcome at the table.
Petty hated the idea of trying to appeal to a core “demographic,” a notion he felt was anathema to the spirit of rock and roll. “I get a lot of letters from little children, and I really like that, because little kids don’t lie,” he said.
P.T. Barnum’s proclamation that “there’s a sucker born every minute” may be a golden rule of show business, but Petty stood in steadfast opposition to that idea. His songs were uncommonly honest. And that, I think, is what makes them so great. The notion of authenticity in music and art is a ridiculous one, yet it’s the subject of endless debate in Nashville, especially where country and roots music is concerned. But the point is always moot. Everyone knows an honest song when they hear one.
Margo Price, our cover subject, is no bullshit artist, either. Her debut solo record, 2016’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, established her as one of Nashville’s young songwriting luminaries. That record was passed up by every Nashville label she sent it to before finding a home at Jack White’s Third Man Records, who embraced it with open arms. It seems plausible to assume the other labels deferred for demographic reasons, because “Hands Of Time,” the album’s centerpiece, is undeniable. An epic cry of the heart, the song chronicles Price’s rough and tumble childhood, the death of her baby years ago, and the slings and arrows that attended the early days of her career. Her new record, All American Made, comes just one year after her debut, and it is even better than its predecessor, which is no small feat.
Finally, we drop in on Bruce Springsteen at one of his residency shows on Broadway. The performance was everything we hoped for, and more, and a reminder of just how nourishing rock and roll can be in the darker hours.
It’s Sunday afternoon in Havana, in late September. Tonight Rufus Wainwright will perform on the stage of the Garcia Lorca Auditorium, an opulent theater space in the Gran Teatro de la Habana, a neo-Baroque showpiece that is one of the architectural marvels of Old Havana. It was here — back in 2016 — that President Obama delivered his historic address to the island, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge did so in 1928.
Tonight, the classically trained Wainwright will play alongside the theater’s symphony orchestra. Carlos Varela, a Cuban folk-rocker and occasional protest singer who rarely performs live anymore, will open the show, sounding at times like a Latin mashup of Roy Orbison and Tom Petty.
The concert is a big affair. The patrons arrive shortly before the 5 p.m showtime. They are dressed with a casual elegance and get out of their taxis at the entrance to the theater. The humidity is oppressive. It is just weeks after Hurricane Irma has menaced the island, leaving 10 Cubans dead, massive flooding in the streets, and much of the island without electricity for more than a week. To the tourist eye, there are few signs of the hurricane’s mark in downtown Havana, other than the closing of the Malecón, the esplanade along the water that runs through seven kilometers of the town. But there are Canadian diplomats sitting next to me, talking about the damage in other parts of the country and the suffering it has caused.
Wainwright’s show is part of a music and cultural tour of Havana that was put together by the U.S. travel company Music Arts Live, with Wainwright performing two shows during the week. The Sunday performance is the final accent on a week-long moveable feast of food, art and music, capped every night with performances from some of Havana’s top musicians at various locales throughout the city.
Tonight’s show is special, in part because it finds Wainwright performing with Cuban musicians for the first time. The theater, with its wraparound balconies, chandeliers and frescoed ceiling, boasts an old-world elegance. So much of the Cuba experience is about the illusion of feeling “back in time,” and this night is no exception. The Montreal native performs frequently with orchestras, and his music is well suited to the format. There is also the understanding that an event like this — a prominent American musician performing with a Cuban orchestra — may not happen for some time, as relations are not good between the two countries.
Halfway through his set on Sunday night, Wainwright, speaking through an interpreter, tells the crowd: “I am American and Canadian. And let’s just say that in Cuba I feel more Canadian. I love the United States … ”
Suddenly, there is a problem with his mic.
“Is that Donald Trump cutting off the sound?” he quips to much laughter.
And then he continues: “I do feel that at the start of the Obama years that things started to look more positive between Cuba and the United States. And now the cat’s been let out of the bag, and we must come together as people, no matter what the Orange Monster says.”
And with that, Wainwright breaks into the darkly foreboding “Going To A Town.”
I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down
I’m going to a place that has already been disgraced
I’m gonna see some folks who have already been let down
I’m so tired of America
There is a sustained and solemn applause from the crowd and the Cuban girl sitting next to me is crying.
*****
A few weeks after the show, the situation between U.S. and Cuba deteriorated. The U.S. State Department expelled 15 Cuban diplomats from the Cuban embassy in Washington, and the Trump administration sent home 60 percent of its embassy staff in Havana, citing a series of “sonic attacks” against American diplomats living there. The attacks, most of which allegedly occurred in 2016, reportedly caused brain swelling and permanent hearing loss in some victims. As a result, Cuban diplomats were kicked out of Washington for not protecting Americans on Cuban soil. The State Department also issued a travel warning saying Americans could be attacked if they visit the island. The U.S. government stopped short of blaming the Cuban government for the attacks, and some have speculated the attacks were the work of Russia, a country whose ties to the island run long and deep. Recently, the Cuban government released a statement saying the noise came from cicadas, believe it or not.
******
Early on in the trip, Wainwright tells his fans at the Melia Habana hotel that the mission of the trip is to help keep U.S-Cuban relations intact. It’s a quixotic statement but one that’s sincere.
Wainwright fell in love with Cuba five years ago, when he first visited the island with his husband, Jorn. At the time, they wanted to see Cuba while Fidel Castro, who died in 2016, was still at the helm. “We were seduced by the architecture and climate, but it was really the people who brought us back,” Wainwright says. “And there was a period with Obama about reconnecting and moving on and it was exciting to be a part of it. And now that the American situation [with Cuba] is not so great, I thought it was important to keep the conversation [that Obama started] going.”
During his time in office, Obama sought rapprochement between the long-time adversaries, even calling for Congress to lift the 54-year embargo on the Communist-ruled country: a plea that would fail to materialize. But progress was made. Diplomatic relations resumed for the first time since the Castro-led revolution in 1959, and foreign embassies in both countries reopened. Some restrictions on American travel to the island were eased, and tourists could bring rum and cigars back to the States. Trump has since sought to overturn several of these measures.
“For all of our differences, the Cuban and American people share common values in their own lives, a sense of patriotism and a sense of pride, a lot of pride,” Obama said during his speech in 2016. “And that’s just why I believe our grandchildren will look back on this period of isolation as an aberration, as just one chapter in a longer story of family and of friendship.”
With the way things are going, that may very well not be the case. But this night at the Gran Teatro is about friendship, it seems. The Cuban minister of culture is even reported to be in the crowd. During the show, Wainwright plays a cross-section of his hits from his nearly 20-year career, including the old chestnut “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk,” a paean to his former indulgences and wilder days. We also hear a selection from his 2010 debut opera Prima Donna. Symphony conductor Giovanni Duarte commands the baton and works well with Wainwright, who comments throughout the show on his classical influences and notes which songs were informed by composers like Ravel and Verdi. Carlos Varela joins Wainwright late in the set. There is also a performance of the Leonard Cohen standard “Hallelujah,” a staple of Wainwright’s repertoire.
*******
A few days before the show at the Gran Teatro, Wainwright and his coterie of fans pay a visit to the National School of Art, a division of the Instituto Superior de Arte. The students, high schoolers, are dressed in uniform — white button-downs with brown pants for the boys and brown skirts for the girls. They represent some of the most promising young musical talents in Cuba, and the school’s list of alumni is long and distinguished.
We are seated outside near a courtyard, and the air is suffocating. Wainwright is there for a Q&A session. He is joined by symphony conductor Giovanni Duarte, an alumnus of the school. Duarte tells the students he lived outside of Havana as a student and had to rise at 4 a.m. each day to make it there on time. “The only thing that saved us all [in those days] was music,” he tells the students, speaking of Cuba’s Especial period, a time in the ‘90s that found Cuba suffering extreme economic distress in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, who had subsidized much of the island’s economy during the Cold War.
An NSA student by the name of Brayan Alvarez dazzles us with his gifts on piano. His piece incorporates elements of classical, ragtime and native Cuban influences. The students at NSA receive general education courses, but the focus here is on the music. They are tested at the pre-kindergarten level, and those who score high in music aptitude are put on a specific track.
Javier Mendez, a self-assured 16-year-old student, steps up to the mic (“I speak English” he says) and volunteers his talents to the crowd, performing Aretha Franklin’s “Ain’t No Way.”
Later, during the Q&A session, Wainwright speaks through an interpreter. There is very little English in Cuba, outside of the tourist center, though private English instruction is reportedly on the rise.
“I always knew I wanted to be a popular performer,” he tells the students at one point. “I chose to use my classical influences as a secret weapon. I like to do that without them knowing what is happening.”
He adds that Nina Simone was the first artist he heard that made him believe it was possible to fuse classical and popular music.
But more than anything else, Wainwright says, he considers himself a songwriter. Early on in his career, he says he would work on his songwriting for hours a day. And then it got easier, he says, and the songs started coming faster. It was then that he decided he needed to challenge himself, so he started writing operas. “When it gets easy, maybe it’s time to try another avenue,” he says.
Wainwright’s first opera, Prima Donna, debuted in 2010, and he’s currently at work on another called Hadrian, set to premiere in Toronto in the fall of 2018.
As the morning winds down, a student from the audience asks Wainwright if he’ll play a song. He responds that he won’t play anything on the piano but will perform a tune with just the vocal.
He then relates a story about his late mother, the Canadian folk-singer Kate McGarrigle. He says that after she died, even though he’s not particularly religious, he went to three churches in New York to light a candle for her, and none of the churches had any candles in stock. “At first I took it as a message [from her],” he said, [that said], “I’m okay, you don’t have to do this anymore. Then I went to Paris and visited Notre Dame Cathedral and lit a candle and I realized my mother just wanted a very different venue.”
Then he proceeded to sing “Candles.”
It’s always just that little bit more
That doesn’t get you what you’re looking for
But gets you where you need to go
But the churches have run out of candles
*****
On the second night of the trip, Wainwright’s group of 100 or so fans — mostly Americans with a smattering of Australians, Europeans and Canadians thrown in the mix — are treated to a private, stripped-down concert at the Teatro de Belles Artes in Old Havana. The show is heavy on banter and Wainwright alternates between a Steinway and Sons piano and a Martin acoustic. We hear two Leonard Cohen covers, including “So Long, Marianne,” as well as few numbers from Wainwright’s recent Shakespearean sonnets album.
The following evening involves a concert at Palacia de la Rumba in the neighborhood of Vedado, a cool and happening arts neighborhood that is also home to the University of Havana. The first band we hear is Yoruba Adabo, one of Cuba’s best-known purveyors of rumba, a style of Cuban music and dance that originated in the late 19th century. Yoruba Adabo practice Yoruba, a West African religion that is often incorporated into Santeria, which mixes West African religions with Roman Catholicism and is practiced widely in Cuba. The group’s performance is attended by dancers, and the crowd, including Wainwright, joins in, giving it their best despite the awkward spectacle it provides.
Next up is the group Interactivo, a jazz collective that has collaborated with many world-class artists, including Wynton Marsalis. The leader of the group is Roberto Carcassés, a keyboard player who graduated from the National School of the Arts in the early ‘90s. For many in attendance this is one of the musical high water marks of the trip.
*******
International tourism has grown substantially in Cuba over the last decade. Even when the U.S. government said it was verboten for Americans to travel to the island — a violation of the Treasury Department’s “Trading With The Enemy Act” — the more enterprising found their way around the restrictions. But for many on this trip, this seemed like it might be the last time they could legally visit Cuba for a while.
In 2010, Raul Castro loosened restrictions to allow for more private enterprise. One local I met there, who did not want her name published, lives in an apartment that her father bought her for $30,000 cash. (The buying and selling of property officially became legal in Cuba in 2011.) Airbnb’s are also now legal in Cuba, and this writer stayed at three different locations, with rates ranging from $20 to $50 per night.
Much of the Cuban economy now operates on the black market. Standard state-sponsored “straight jobs,” even ones that require a higher education degree, pay very little, so many Cubans take up side hustles to make ends meet. The average Cuban salary is around $25 per month. Black market gigs could involve things like driving an unmarked taxi and catering to tourists or selling fake Cuban cigars on the street. Food rationing still exists, and all Cubans receive a monthly allotment of rice, sugar and oil, but it’s not enough to live on.
There seems to be a constant shortage of humanitarian goods. One of my Airbnb hosts tells me there is only one store in Havana that is carrying toilet paper at the moment. “This is how it is in Havana,” he says with a laugh.
Another Cuban I meet says he had an opportunity to move to the United States, under a very special circumstance allowed by the Cuban government, but decided against it, reasoning that life as an immigrant in the U.S. would prove too difficult. “I’m not rich but I have a nice life here,” he says.
Monuments to the revolution pervade the town. A sign along the road to the airport reads “Socialism or death” in Spanish. Another billboard advertises the upcoming elections in 2017 and 2018, with the tagline “a genuine demonstration of democracy.” One sees very few image of Fidel Castro, as the former leader requested that his image not be reproduced across the country, but the visage of Che Guevara, who was Argentinian but fought with Castro in the revolution, is ubiquitous.
Some Cubans harbor hope for political reform when Raul Castro steps down as president in 2018. Miguel Diaz-Canel, a Communist Party official that currently serves as one of the country’s vice presidents, is said to be the logical successor. The name of Raul’s daughter, Mariela, a social progressive, has also been mentioned.
One is tempted to avoid the romanticized portrait of a place that often attends a vacation, but there is no denying that the people in Cuba are incredibly friendly and warm. There is also very little violent crime in Cuba — guns and drugs are basically non-existent— so the place feels unnaturally safe from those threats, at least. Hitchhiking is a national pastime, along with baseball and flirting, I’m told. You always feel like a fiesta could strike up anywhere.
*****
On Sunday night, after the show at the Gran Teatro, Wainwright and his group head to the house of his friend Pamela Ruiz, an American expat who grew up in New York City and now lives in Havana. Ruiz runs a paladar — a unique Cuban concept whereby the owner runs a restaurant out of their place of residence — from her villa in Vedado. Ruiz’s husband is a Cuban visual and mixed media artist named Damian Aquiles. (Their home was the subject of a 2015 New York Times magazineprofile, where they’ve entertained the likes of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith.)
The evening is the perfect cap to a great week of music, art, friendship and history. Aquiles’ artwork adorns the walls, and there are two bars serving mojitos. Later, we are served paella out of a huge vat. This is the best meal we’ve had all week by a long shot, and we all feel lucky to get a privileged glimpse into this secret garden of Havana.
The September/October 2016 issue, featuring Miranda Lambert on the cover, hits newsstands on September 12, but the digital edition will be ready and available for download on September 6. In addition to the feature on Lambert, the issue includes profiles of The National, The War On Drugs, Colter Wall, The Killers, Torres, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and many more. Below is the editor’s note from the new issue.
This issue is going to press just days after a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer was run over and killed in broad daylight in Charlottesville, Virginia while protesting a white supremacist rally. Nineteen others were reported injured that day, including a black man named Deandre Harris was severely beaten in a parking garage by some of the marchers.
President Trump drew ire for not immediately denouncing the white supremacists with Unite The Right, a segment that is understood to be part and parcel of his base. The following Monday he finally rebuked them, but for many it was too little, too late. There were also more callings for the firing of White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, whose prior work at the right-wing website Breitbart, Bannon once claimed, helped create the platform for the alt-right, a movement dedicated to white supremacy and white nationalism.
As of press time there are plans for more white supremacist rallies and Richard Spenser, the buttoned-up de facto leader of the movement, has vowed to make Charlottesville the center of its universe.
There will no doubt be a flood of songs about Charlottesville. It was a historical moment, to be sure. Wilco released one just two days after the event, with proceeds benefiting the Southern Poverty Law Center. “My dad was named after a Civil War general, and he voted for Barack Obama twice,” Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy said upon the song’s release. “He used to say, ‘If you know better, you can do better.’ America — we know better. We can do better.”
It’s been argued Trump’s appeal to the white working class is due to the group’s economic desolation. But the alt-right, whose actual numbers don’t appear to be that large, are driven by other things as well. Spencer’s motivation appears to be purely ethnocultural. He is the son of a north Dallas ophthalmologist and holds degrees from the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago, and Duke University. He does not come from a desperate economic situation — he just wants a white nation state.
*******
Art and politics have always been tricky bedfellows, and it is a difficult balancing act when songwriters take on the big societal issues. How constructive is agitprop or rhetoric in songwriting? And how do you avoid just preaching to the choir?
Steve Earle, no stranger to politically tinged songs, says the job of songwriting is about empathy, about making people see the humanity in those different from them (a tall order when dealing with neo-Nazis). Bruce Springsteen has adroitly walked the line between the political and personal. A lifelong Democrat who campaigned for Obama and Hillary Clinton, Springsteen’s audience comprises fans from all political stripes, even though he has caught heat at times. A New York Police group, for instance, called for a boycott after the Boss wrote and performed“American Skin (41 Shots),” a song from ’99 about the shooting of Amadou Diallo by four NYPD plain-clothes officers. Springsteen continues to play the song in concert to this day.
So much of American folk music, it seems, has tilted toward the left. Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie were not partisans but they frequently targeted fascists and authoritarianism. The famously omitted verse of Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” questions the legitimacy of private property and his song “The Unwelcome Guest,”from the Billy Bragg and Wilco Mermaid Avenue sessions, is a Marxist anthem if there ever was one.
Country music, throughout its history, has spoken to a certain social structure, one that is largely religious and conservative. Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” was in many ways a tribute to the white working class. Haggard wrote it, he said, in support of the type of people he grew up with, the ones who were going to be sent to Vietnam because they had no other choice. He was tired of seeing them get picked on by the hippies and privileged class, so he stood up for them.
The late Lou Reed once asked Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright from Czechoslovakia whose work helped dismantle Communism, and who later became president of the Czech Republic, if art and music could change the world. Havel said art could not change things on its own, but added that it could change people, and it was up to them to take it from there.
Since Trump’s election, there has been a growing chorus calling for country artists to speak out against racism, since they have the ear of rural and conservative America. One mainstream country singer, Kip Moore, took to Instagram after Charlottesville and repudiated the racism he saw growing up that still exists.
“The gift of kindness may start as a small ripple that has the potential of turning into a tidal wave,” Moore wrote. “… It starts with each one of us individually if we wanna change what this world looks like. Go out of your way to take care of people and spread kindness … I’m not tryin’ to preach, but I’m way more concerned with the state of my fellow brother than the state of my Instagram following. Take a break from your 100th bathroom selfie and pay attention to what’s taking place around you.”
Late in his set at the Ryman Auditorium, Steve Earle said he’d stood onstage in Chicago many moons ago and told fans that all of his dreams had come true. It was in that moment, he said, that he realized he needed to find some new dreams, and find them fast.
One of those second-act dreams came true Friday night when the so-called last of the hardcore troubadours, whose career has spanned 17 albums and survived all manner of slings and arrows, headlined the Ryman for the first time.
“This is a big deal for us,” he told the crowd.
A child of Texas, Earle was seven years old visiting his grandmother in Nashville, he said, when he first came to the Ryman, where he watched from the balcony as Bill Monroe performed on the Grand Ole Opry. He said he’d been thinking about that experience all day before launching into “You Broke My Heart,” an old-timey sounding country waltz that he wrote in the spirit of the venue.
“You Broke My Heart” features on Earle’s latest, So You Wanna Be Outlaw, an album that functions as a tribute of sorts to Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson and their fight to wrest artistic control away from the anal retentive Nashville studio system. Like so many country greats who get slapped with the problematic “outlaw” tag, Earle’s output has been both traditional and subversive, a fact that was evident in a set list that moved peripatetically across genres.
The front end of Earle’s show drew heavily from the new album, and the third song of the night, “The Firebreak Line,” tipped its hat to America’s firefighters. With wildfires menacing much of the West, the tune is a modern-day folk number that finds Earle channeling his innermost Woody Guthrie. Another set highlight was “News From Colorado,” a song he co-wrote with his niece Emily Earle and ex-wife Allison Moorer before they split.
“Emily is in the crowd tonight, and Allison is not,” Earle deadpanned, adding that the audience would be hearing more from his niece, a Nashville-based songwriter who “survived for four weeks on The Voice without managing to end up in the hot tub with CeeLo.”
Hanging over the night, as if in benediction, was the legacy of Guy Clark, a mentor to Earle and a host of other Texas and Tennessee songwriters through the years. Before performing “Goodbye Michelangelo,” a song written about Clark shortly after his death, Earle spoke about the “L.A. Freeway” writer’s final days and the all-night bus trip he took with Clark’s inner sanctum to deliver Guy’s ashes to Santa Fe. He then talked about his old teacher’s decision to co-write late in his career, a move that inspired Earle’s own recent co-writing ventures.
Back in the ‘70s, Clark had advised against co-writing, but he eventually changed his tune. “Mainly I just got stuck, I ran out of shit to say,” he told American Songwriter in 2011. “I’ve found that with co-writing, there are a lot of young phenomenal songwriters and guitar players that come over here and write. And I learn so much from these guys. I’ll go, ‘Wow, how did you think of that?’ Or, ‘let me learn it.’”
Earle encored the show with “Desperadoes Waiting For A Train.” A song from Clark’s first album about a young kid and his hero’s death, it brought the night full circle.
Opening the show was Lucero, the Memphis bar-band exemplars who were playing the Mother Church for the first time. “We’ve never played the Ryman before but this is quite a place ya’ll have got,” said frontman Ben Nichols, who swigged whiskey throughout the set and joked that “you’d be nervous too if it was your first time playing the Ryman.”
There must be something about the Ryman and the memory of grandparents. Earle spoke about his grandmother, and before the last Lucero song of the night, Nichols wondered aloud what his grandfather would have thought about him playing the august venue. With just his accordionist, the unassuming frontman then delivered an emotional reading of “The War,” a song from 2005’s Nobody’s Darlings that recounts his grandfather’s experience in World War II. “Cause takin’ orders never suited me, giving them out was much worse,” Nichols sang, summoning a spirit kindred to his own.
When Pablo Picasso saw the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux in southwestern France for the first time, in 1940, he remarked that modern art had invented nothing. The sophistication of the 17,000-year-old images — mostly animals in the form of bison, bulls and horses, some of which appear to be in motion — humbled him to the point that he questioned his own ideas about art, and his role in its history. Or so the story (which may be totally apocryphal) goes.
In 1955, Chuck Berry released “Maybellene” to the world. The song introduced an iconic guitar sound and several Berry themes that he’d continue to thread throughout his songs: girls, cars, and the open road. Sixty-two years later, the tune crackles with such energy and spirit one is left to wonder whether modern rock has invented anything. With few exceptions (The Beatles’ Revolver and Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”), it seems there has been little that has approached the heights of “Maybellene,” that has kicked open the doors with such force and promised so much new life.
Berry died this March at the age of 90. “He is rock and roll in its pure essence,” Keith Richards wrote in Rolling Stone after his passing. “He was the granddaddy of us all.” John Lennon, also one to acknowledge his debt to his forebears, famously said Berry’s name was synonymous with the art form.
Before his passing, Berry recorded an album of original songs called Chuck that was released this June. It was his first release since 1979. Some of the songs date back to the ’80s, and the story of how the album came to be made is a long and circuitous one. Berry enlisted help from his family and his new record label Dualtone, whom we interview in the cover story.
By all accounts, Berry was a complicated man, guilty of some indiscretions in his time that are hard to ignore. But there are also testimonies that reveal a generous spirit and beloved family man. It seems fitting that Berry sprang from St. Louis, a town on the Mississippi River, that mysterious waterway traveled by Huckleberry Finn and Jim that is symbolic of so much of the nation’s history and racial past. Like his fellow founding father, Elvis, Berry synthesized blues, R&B and hillbilly music to create a whole new sound that transcended racial lines and perhaps sought, on some level, to bridge that great divide.
As Stephen Deusner points out, Berry taught us how to be a rock songwriter. “He wrote with verve and clarity, borrowing from the American songbook and using ‘Wabash Cannonball’ and ‘Old Brown Jug’ as the raw materials.” Berry once told Robbie Robertson that he drew from poetry to craft his early songs. Lennon certainly appreciated his lyrical innovation. “In the ’50s, when people were virtually singing about nothing, Chuck Berry was writing social-comment songs, with incredible meter to his lyrics,” he said.
Berry is not just an artist for this world. Back in 1977, when NASA launched the Voyager 1, “Johnny B. Goode” was featured on the “golden record” carried by the spacecraft, along with selections from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and bluesman Blind Willie Johnson. The record was meant to serve as a document of life on Earth in our time and as a potential gift to extra-terrestrial life. Now in interstellar space, it is the farthest man-made object from the planet.
“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings,” former President Jimmy Carter says on the record. “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” Indeed.
Caine O'Rear 