when Elvis became Che

Phil Ochs, from the liner notes of The Broadside Tapes:

When they show the destruction of society on color TV, I want to be able to look out over Los Angeles and make sure they get it right.

Leaving America is like losing twenty pounds and finding a new girlfriend.

A protest song is a song that's so specific that you cannot mistake it for bullshit.

And if there's any home for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.

The final story, the final chapter of western man, I believe, lies in Los Angeles.

Kate McGarrigle has died

Kate McGarrigle has died. Here is a YouTube video recording of the McCarrigle Sisters performing "Heart Like a Wheel." Thanks to Irwyn Applebaum, who sent me the link, I've just now watched Kate's performance of a new song, "Proserpina," at the recent family Christmas concert. "Proserpina, Proserpina, come home to mama." I'm very moved by this performance, as remarkable a goodbye as could be imagined. Come home to mama.

Pete's 90th

Dave Matthews at the Garden last night.

I and 15,000 others sang "Happy Birthday" to Pete Seeger last night at Madison Square Garden. Springsteeen sang "The Ghost of Tom Joad" with Tom Morello, after a longish introduction by Bruce which ended: "He's gonna look a lot like your granddad that wears flannel shirts and funny hats. He gonna look like your granddad if your granddad can kick your ass." We saw and heard Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp ("If I Had a Hammer"), Ani DiFranco (selflessly sang to accompany several others), Arlo Guthrie ("Oh Mary Don't You Weep" with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band), Billy Bragg (prefaced by a great story of Pete's musical teachings), Bruce Cockburn (intense as always), Emmylou Harris (the most moving performance of "The Water Is Wide" I"ve ever heard), Joan Baez (two songs--the first not quite her usual, the second, "Jacob's Ladder," fantastic), Kris Kristofferson ("Got a Hole in My Bucket, Dear Liza"), Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Richie Havens (sang "Freedom"--his Woodstock song), Roger McGuinn (did the Animals version of "Turn, Turn, Turn"), Steve Earle, Taj Mahal (a favorite of mine), Bernice Reagon, Dar Williams, Tom Chapin, Tom Paxton, Eric Weissberg, and others.

The opening of the 4-hour performance: a lone light shone on Seeger (but we didn't really know it was Pete) as he played a flute solo called "Menomonee Love Song." As the lights came up, they revealed the outline of a sloop, apt for an event titled the "Clearwater Concert" after the organization's vessel, the gaff sloop Clearwater.

Best:

1) Dave Matthews, after telling us he should introduce himself as "David," since that's what his mother called him and she was the one who took him to his first concert, near Croton NY--a Pete Seeger concert. Matthews sang an emotional but musically pure version of "Whiskey Rye Whiskey."

2) Emmylou Harris, "The Water Is Wide," as noted above. Not a dry eye in the house.

3) Springsteen and Morello, trading verses of "The Ghost of Tom Joad." Earlier in the week (!) I'd seen Bruce with the E Street Band, a great concert. The whole band did its hauntingly good "Tom Joad," but this, Bruce in the clear voice of a guy singing for just 10 minutes in a whole evening, and two acoustic guitars, and a harmony with Morello, was even better.

4) Seeger, Baez, Billy Bragg, Emmy Lou Harris singing "We Shall Overcome."

the rest of it's there too

Jon Pareles has gotten some great quotes from Bruce Springsteen for his big piece in today's New York Times. Pareles knows it's big, that his claim is big. The piece is called "The Rock Laureate."

I, for one, accept the claim (happily as well as logically).

Others have seen Springsteen in the Whitman/proletarian Guthrie/folk American tradition (the best writer about Bruce in this mode is David Wyatt in Out of the Sixties--and Greil Marcus gets it too), but I still can't help feeling as a fresh wind in my face the vague faux-rough visionary romanticism of Springsteen's spoken rhetoric. Below are two quotes from Pareles' essay. In the first, the phrase "eight years" obviously refers to the two terms of George Bush. The oracular ("swimming in the current of history") is flattened and made humble really really nicely by "your music is doing the same thing."

The second quote begins unpromisingly with yet another Where were you when Obama was elected? anecdote but then indulges gorgeously, I think, in the vaguest American pronoun referent - the it of liberationist folk spirit. This is the same "it" that Steinbeck uses clumsily at various points in--and at the end of--The Grapes of Wrath. But Henry Miller, when he really got going, used it well. Dreiser, too, in rare upbeat passages. And, at several crucial moments, William Carlos Williams. And early in Kerouac. And Ashbery in several poems about America, most movingly in "The One Thing That Can Save America" (ironic title--but the sentiment about "it" is true). And, in his hyperdemocratic WWII newspaper pieces, Ira Wolfert. And in times of crisis, Eric Severeid (he of Upper Midwest labor-populism), spoken on the air in the endless insistent sentence. And Whitman, often.

At its least interesting, all this takes us merely to a cheap, easy spot where, because of some momentary alliance, Kate Smith meets Woody Guthrie. At its best, though, it's the great provocative American cultural confluence.

"[E]ight years go by, and that’s where you find yourself. You’re in there, you’re swimming in the current of history and your music is doing the same thing.”

"[O]n election night it showed its face, for maybe, probably, one of the first times in my adult life,” he said. “I sat there on the couch, and my jaw dropped, and I went, ‘Oh my God, it exists.’ Not just dreaming it. It exists, it’s there, and if this much of it is there, the rest of it’s there. Let’s go get that. Let’s go get it. Just that is enough to keep you going for the rest of your life. All the songs you wrote are a little truer today than they were a month or two ago.”

Well, this is a circular and probably self-serving final statement. Of course the songs are "truer" now that you're on the inside--you're in and so you can sing them as part of the bona fide (but, alas, temporary) language of the nation. No, the songs being truer now than before is not what's remarkable about Bruce. What's remarkable is his strong antipoetic (and thus very poetic) sense of the big "it," and he enacts this sense out of two great talents simultaneously: first, a resistance to narrowing or clarifying it and an ability to flow fast with it and yet not infuriate listeners; second, his sense that new songs will come from the place where the rest of it is to be found. He's on a roll, no doubt. Listen for some of the rest of it in the new album.

husk and bark left on the notes

I've unearthed Robert Shelton's September 29, 1961 NYT review of Bob Dylan at Gerde's Folk City. "Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap." "Mr. Dylan is both comedian and tragedian." "...a scarcely understandable growl or sob..." "All the husk and bark are left on the notes." Here's the whole review.

walking around New York in a red aura

Pepi Ginsberg, the 24-year-old Brooklyn (via Philadelphia) singer-songwriter, has a new video out - a song, "On the Waterline," that's on her new album, Red. Albert Birney directed the video and it's a fine one: Pepi's evocative warbly voice, ruminative and Dylanesque through phrasal repetitions, is matched by what the Stereogum note-writer calls the "vintage, analog-drenched feel" of the video. Her lyrics are poems for sure. Bias disclosure: Pepi (aka Jessy) was a student of mine many times over, and a close affiliate of the Writers House, and one of my favorite people in the world.

get your headlines in musical poetry

"Before the days of television and mass media, the folksinger was often a traveling newspaper spreading tales through music. There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song."

That's Phil Ochs, introducing to "The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo" on Phil Ochs in Concert and There But for Fortune.

photo dated 1966