A DIALOGUE ON PAUL SIMON'S "AMERICAN TUNE"

 (This is a dialogue between writer Barry Alfonso and me regarding the song 'American Tune" by Paul Simon from his 1973 album There Goes Rhymin' Simon. The chat was published in The San Diego Troubadour , keenly edited by good friend Liz Abbott, the best friend a music scene could have. Barry begins introduces the conversation with some concise and salient background, and then off we go.)

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Paul Simon’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, a mostly good-humored LP that contrasted with the often-melancholy tone of the singer-songwriter’s earlier work with Art Garfunkel. The exception to Rhymin’ Simon’s sunniness was “American Tune” an elegy for lost dreams set to a Bach chorale that overshadowed everything else on the album. I can remember the impact of the song on me as a teenager. And I remember also the reaction I had to reading a review of Rhymin’ Simon that appeared in the July 12, 1973 edition of the San Diego Reader, written by a cogent, sharp-elbowed critic named Ted Burke. Burke dismissed much of the album as “diffuse, distracted,” the work of an artist “mumbling to himself.” Ouch! However, Ted pronounced “American Tune” brilliant—and it was and still is. Remarkably, it has endured in popularity and significance, transcending its immediate relevance to the loss of 1960s’ idealism to be revived again and again to mark the national heartaches of the moment. Simon went on to write other outstanding songs, of course – and both of us went on to become friends at college and remain enduring partners in aesthetic crime ever since. Recently, we got together at a coffee spot on 30th Street in South Park to trade thoughts about “American Tune,” Paul Simon, and related matters in true rock critic codger fashion, still contentious after all these years…

 Barry Alfonso: When I read your Rhymin’ Simon review, Ted, I took criticism of Paul Simon very personally. I was like those intensely loyal Taylor Swift fans are today. I identified with his work, maybe a little too much. I wonder what your attitude about that album is now. Looking back over what you wrote 50 years later, do you think this is still a fair review?

 

Ted Burke: There’s nothing like 20/20 hindsight, which means I would have written a less severe review. In the ’70s I had the unfortunate habit of reviewing albums by favorite artists that didn’t rise to my standard as a personal betrayal, a conscious act of bad faith. Over time, post review, I had to admit that all of Simon’s skills as a songwriter were present throughout the disc, although I think that my original opinion was on target, that it was an honest attempt in song to venture beyond the elegantly constructed tunes regarding loneliness and encroaching despair. Lyrically, the stuff that was at the expressive heart of Simon’s oeuvre was weak tea for the most part. I think it’s the honest effort of a gifted writer trying new things, new voices.

 Barry: You had some good things to say about his song “Kodachrome” in there. Do you like the line, “Everything looks worse and black and white?” He’s right about that. 

Ted: It’s a great song and one that works in that it’s an effectively whimsical reminiscence of his days in high school. In a way you can say that it’s one of the first times Simon has expressed disappointment with the adulthood he’s grown into. The line that “everything looks better in black and white” is revealing in that the tune uses a Kodachrome camera as a device through which to wax poetic about a simpler time, with the suggestion that his picture taking captures a world he knows is disappearing with time and maturity. “Everything looks better in black and white” comes across as a sigh, a soft admission that despite glaring color of the pictures he snapped of the things he remembers, his thinking about them is literally black and white; life was fun and simple and full of adventure and then suddenly it became hard, full of jobs, families, debt, responsibilities, and the pains of aging. Simon does the cool trick of slipping in a subtle admission, a confession maybe, that the way his narrator is regarding his past is idyllic and untrustworthy, even to himself. This foreshadows what I consider Rhymin Simon’s best song a masterpiece, I think, which is “American Tune.”

 When I first heard the song, I thought the melody was gorgeous, moody, and reflective in elegant movements that were unusual even in Simon’s strongest songwriting. He was a superb creator of folk-informed melodic structures, and he was quite good at incorporating different music styles seamlessly: New Orleans sounds, reggae, a whole slew of Latin influences. Think what you will of the cultural styles he borrowed from; he used them wonderfully. But “American Tune” had a more architectural structure; it was subtler and had a haunting emotional power to it. It fit the lyrics, which themselves were something different for Simon, a deeper dive into a theme. Johann Sebastian Bach

 Barry: Did you know at the time that it was a Bach chorale? It wasn’t the first time that lyrics were set to this piece of music. In 1948, Tom Glazer used it as the setting for “Because All Men Are Brothers,” a workers’ anthem later recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary. It is stirring in a different way than “American Tune” is.  

Ted: I never realized that Simon had borrowed the music from Bach until I heard it on the classical station we play inside the bookstore where I work. That was a small but important revelation, and I could very well imagine how Bach’s doleful composition might have inspired Simon to write the lyrics in the tone and gravity he did. It might well have been the thing that gave him the stimulation to express some long-gestating notions that he until then couldn’t quite find the rhyme or reason for. This is rare and the melody inspired the tone of the lyrics, which was a mixture of nostalgia, disappointment, and melancholy, but it was always sort of softly played, and everything was still hopeful. You know, kind of like “I wanna go where all the good people go to sleep and wake up tomorrow, because tomorrow is another day.”

 His genius as a lyricist is heard in the unexpected and amazing leaps in the narrative line. In “American Tune,” this happens after the narrator fatalistically ruminates over living in a world that has lost its promise and purpose, where he goes on to the middle portion, where he dreams that he’s flying and down below him is the Statue of Liberty. I found myself beginning to have a visceral response to those lines, making me reflect upon my own sense of the inability of us to do better. We know better, but we do not do better. And yet this still goes on. And we have the money, we have the technology, we have the means to make this all better for everybody. But we don’t. Everything is piecemeal, everything is spare change, everything is compromised. What you have in terms of gathering your own strength is remembering your disappointments and trying to remember your dreams. And the dreams say you push out, you know, some faith that something better will come. I mean, for me, that was like thinking of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

 In the Cooke song, the singer speaks of brutality, hardships, and repression, a seemingly systematic discrimination intended to confine black Americans to the margins of society. But the song is about a tradition of faith, powered by the gospel of uplift that comes from the African American Church. The singer admits the hardship inflicted upon Black Americans and yet declares that he knows that things will change, that the Promised Land Dr. King spoke of exists in the hearts of all Americans, and that black Americans will have a seat at the big table. There’s a strong faith that this America does exist, or that it can still come into being if the lot of us put our shoulders to the wheel and move the country in the direction it needs to travel. It’s a prayer, really, for our country to transcend its worst traits and embrace a brotherhood and sisterhood of citizens that’s stronger for its diversity. Sam Cook’s performance lays out the tragedy of the black experience evocatively and yet is optimistic, hopeful in ways only the oppressed can be in times when faith is all there is to get you through the day and the days ahead.

 “American Tune” as well talks about life in a country where the promises of freedom, opportunity, and a harmonious life are severely lacking. But Simon’s song is downbeat, sad, and bitter and melancholic in the face of the chance that the America we’ve dreamed of living in is gone forever or that it never existed at all.

 I think the song works because of its brevity. I think it works because of the melody. I like the fact that he manages to step away from this position of a poet and developed another voice like somebody’s talking, you know, in words, which are festooned with literary analogies. I really don’t like most of the work he did with Simon and Garfunkel. His songs back then seemed to say, “This is what I think poetry sounds like.” I’m thinking of “April, Come She Will”: “I heard cathedral bells tripping down the alleyways” or “The Sounds of Silence”: “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls…” You know, I was gonna bring something up about the movie we walked out of years ago… 

Barry: Yeah, it was from The English Patient: “The heart is the organ of fire.” You reacted to a spring in the theater seat that had stabbed you in the butt!

 One thing that still strikes me about “American Tune” is that it is an elegy for something that is gone. And I can’t think of any hit song from the rock era that expressed something like that. The closest thing I came up with, one that is very different but linked with the same era, is “Abraham, Martin and John,” which has a little hope in it. But the last verse of that makes you want to cry because it adds Robert Kennedy to the list. It’s a public elegy for something that’s been lost and that’s what “American Tune” is. It’s almost unprecedented that something like that would get the exposure that it did. Can you think of something comparable?

 Ted: I would say that would be “American Pie.” That song is a little more ambiguous, but yes, I see the comparison. What those two songs [“Abraham, Martin and John” and “American Pie”] have in common is the purposeful name dropping, actual names and obvious references to historical analogues. That’s why I like Simon’s song. I think he transcends them all because he’s speaking generally. I think he’s speaking across generations, whereas “Abraham, Martin and John” has lost much of its power of expressing a collective desire to make a better world. Message songs that invoke specific names and events don’t often occur to listeners when they regard the music of Dylan or Phil Ochs; specificity isn’t an element that travels much beyond the history books, but it’s the more generalized work, the lyrics leaning toward more poetic and elusive atmosphere are the ones that are remembered. Dylan famously accused Phil Ochs of just being a journalist, not a songwriter at the time when Ochs was still writing protest songs and Dylan started his experiments with surrealistic scenarios. Dylan was being a jerk, I guess, but he was right in the sense that audiences seeking something to listen to and help them create a sense of themselves in the world desire poetry, not editorials. It might sound cynical, but Dion’s song is nearly nostalgia, an Edenic daydream, right up there with “Get Together” by the Youngbloods. 

Barry: As I recall, “Abraham, Martin and John” meant a lot to people at the time. Listening to it was participating in an act of public mourning. I don’t know precisely what Simon’s motives were, but I suspect that it came out of his experience with the McGovern for president campaign. We saw Richard Nixon, the embodiment of all these terrible things, being reelected in the landslide. And Simon got back together with Garfunkel, whom he had rather bitterly broken up with to do a benefit for McGovern. He was all in for McGovern and watched him get wiped out in November of ’72. 1973 really felt like that was the end of the ’60s. And so “American Tune” came out in May of ’73 and it sounded like an elegy for everything that went before. I think that Simon had a stake in it personally. When I hear him singing about the dreams being shattered and driven to their knees, he’s not just talking about the workaday world, he’s talking about these bigger things that Americans just didn’t seem to live up to.

 The thing that gets me and got me wanting to talk to you about “American Tune” is how it keeps being revived, because it always seems relevant to certain moments of national disappointment and tragedy. It was written in reaction to specific events, yet it keeps being recorded and people keep getting meaning out of it. It’s 50 years later, and it’s like time hasn’t moved on. All the things that he’s addressing in that song are still relevant.

 Ted: A real generation spans 30 years, the years from youth to adulthood and between the time that young people become adults. they have families and eventually become grandparents. Generations that came after the Boomers, you and I had our own sense of disparity between the promises of hard work and advancement and the collectively felt experience. We look for heroes to help us come to terms with that.

  

When you’re a hero, you’re supposed to become the person everybody thinks you should be. I remember A.J. Weberman, the self-described “Dylanologist” who would go through Bob Dylan’s garbage and claimed that he had created a new science or sociology, all of which was based on his conviction that Bob Dylan wasn’t just a songwriter and poet but also a seer, a philosopher and prophet of things to come. I remember reading, with interest, a self-published squib he produced where there was a lot of tea leaf reading and how particular lines of Dylan songs forecast grave, epochal disruptions. The obsession with Dylan, the cottage industry of producing books about Dylan, biographies, interpretations, and all these other gratuitous additions to the prose committed to that, that this songwriter was disrespectful to the artist himself, because Dylan wanted to be left alone…

 Barry: How would this relate to Paul Simon? It’s interesting; Simon is not somebody where people go through his garbage for clues about how he thinks. He came out of a somewhat of a workaday, songwriting world. He’d been a momentary teenage rock star with “Hey Schoolgirl.” He was friends with Carole King and could have been a Brill Building tunesmith. Then, he went to went to England and became a folk singer. But he’s not a Bob Dylan-like figure. He is not regarded as a cultural leader in that respect. So, would it take someone like that to produce a song like “American Tune”? I mean, isn’t it interesting that Simon would be the one to write a song like that? Simon is not the kind of person that people were always over-analyzing and going through his trash for clues about how he lives.

 Ted: The difference is that Paul Simon is a professional songwriter. He sits down and he has a topic and he’s going to write about it. And he’s going to write a melody, he’s going to write lyrics, and I’m sure he’s also somebody who looks at what he’s written and edits things out.

 Barry: Well, here’s something else, too. In a way “American Tune” relates to the other songs on There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, the ones that you don’t care for. Simon might be saying, “Why am I writing all these lightweight songs about looking back at high school and here’s a lullaby for my young son and all these other light, fluffy songs? It’s because ‘American Tune’ is so heavy and it’s so much a meditation how things are now that I’ve got to write these other light songs to be alive and to be in this world.” The comparative lack of lyrical depth in songs like “Was a Sunny Day” or “St. Judy’s Comet” is a reaction to the depressing spirit of the times, just as—in a different way—“American Tune” is. 

Ted: Simon was also under pressure to produce a hit album. 

Barry: His first post-Garfunkel solo album was successful but not a huge hit. [It reached Number 32 on the Billboard Album Chart.] 

Ted: I think his solo career is nearly flawless in terms of albums. And in terms of Rhymin’ Simon, of the albums he’s put out that I’ve listened to, it’s the one I care for the least.

 Barry: In a way, “Loves Me Like a Rock” fuses the lighter sensibility of the album with Simon’s more thoughtful side. In it, Simon is saying, “If I was the president / The minute the Congress called my name/ I’d say, ‘now who you were fooling?’ / I got the presidential seal…,’” in other words, fuck off and get out of my face. It’s Richard Nixon razzing his enemies and the American people set to a gospel tune. He’s talking about the current situation with Nixon and the Watergate investigations, and he’s sort of riffing on the mood of the moment. It’s a fusion of the two sensibilities in an odd way.

 Ted: Well, the thing I also liked about Simon was his ability to look at his own image as a sad man just out of a relationship or overwhelmed with tragic nostalgia. Or he’s writing about something more ethereal. And you know, he does something like “50 Ways to Leave your Lover,” which just starts off like another sad Paul Simon song. And then, he says, “get on the bus, Gus….” That’s a nice touch that indicates he is self-aware of his image as a writer of melancholic songs. He’s a man who notices when there’s too much air in his tires.

 Barry: Yeah, I think he generally shows a lot of good taste, sometimes maybe too much good taste, but I would agree. 

Ted: I thought Graceland was Simon’s best record. It probably is one of the masterpieces of its time. “The Boy in the Bubble” has one of my favorite lines of all time—after all these surreal imageries and all these references to technology and media and the Age of Miracle and Wonder, he says, “This is the long distance call.” Yeah, it’s such a throwaway line, but it’s beautiful. 

Barry: No, it’s great. He could go widescreen when he wanted to, quite successfully. So, ultimately, what do you think people still get from “American Tune” when they hear it now?

 

Ted: I think people are nostalgic. And there’s always this useful past that they long for. I think most people I know—eventually everybody talks about the old days and just things just aren’t the way they used to be, or the way they should be.

 Barry: … “and everything looks worse in black and white.” 

Ted: What do people still relate to in “American Tune”? I remember having conversations, many of them, with my friends and classmates in the late sixties and seventies that, as high schoolers, our generation was smarter, more enlightened, that we were hopeful and had a moral compass that would change the culture, end racism and war, and undo the evils of capitalism. I remember reading The Greening of America by Charles Reich, wherein a lapsed academic prophesied an Eden on Earth because the younger generation would make the world irrefutably fairer and better in every regard. It was a real head trip and likely made some of the crowd I ran with a might smug and maybe even a bit delusional about what they thought they deserved. I had heady expectations, and there were no shortage of writers, activists, and media sorts reinforcing the idea that the Youthquake, as many called it, would tip the scales toward Heaven. And we were enlightened by many different sources: the hippies, early formations of New Age ideas, civil rights, politics, religious ideas because we’re an enlightened species, but also an awful lot of us at the time were in school and had a lot of leisure time; we didn’t have a lot of adult responsibilities. I’m speaking for many of us, not all of us, but the magazines reinforced that we can just keep doing all this stuff. We can just do it ad infinitum; this will never end and we’ll just get better and better, but it never did, because we became adults. People started having children, so they had to get jobs and pay mortgages. They had to pay income taxes and they had to accept that. I think a lot of people miss the days when they didn’t have many responsibilities.

 Barry: You think all of that is in “American Tune”? 

Ted: It’s implied. Simon’s narrator in the tune has equal measures of ennui, depression, melancholy, and disappointment. This works as a soliloquy of someone in the second half of life. It’s poetic, reflective, and woeful, a recollection of experiences that have brought us no closer to Heaven. We kind of see that in more recent history with the Slacker attitude or in the glorified hype about “Silent quitting,” of doing only the bare minimum required at a job because it’s a deadening, heartless routine. It’s interesting to contrast this with “A Change Is Gonna Come,” where the singer and the audience share the hard and bitter history of oppression, violence, and discrimination as Black Americans, yet they still get out of bed with the conviction that despite it all they will work even harder for the better world they believe in. The sad fact of the matter is that the generation Simon sings of in “American Tune” sounds like they miss the days when their job wasn’t to pay the rent. They, we, didn’t expect to be breadwinners and now we’re saddled with all this stuff. Well, what have we become? Have you become your parents? Yeah, you’re supposed to be the adult now. 

Barry: Maybe that is the true source of weariness and resignation in “American Tune,” the realization that it is time to grow up! 

It’s worth noting that sometime recently Simon rewrote some of the key lines in “American Tune” to reflect a wider historical understanding. He changed “We come on a ship they call the Mayflower / we come on a ship that sailed the moon” to “We didn’t come here on the Mayflower / We came on a ship in a blood red moon.” Rhiannon Giddens sang those new lyrics at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival with Simon backing her up on guitar. This reference to the horrors of slavery and the middle passage changes the whole meaning of the song. Was the poison in the American apple from the very beginning? It’s not that the apple went rotten. The poison was in there all along. 

Ted: It’s probably the one time I can think of where a revision helps the song in terms of making it even more timeless. 

Barry: Yeah, because the song could always be accused of—well, this is the evil of the privileged life. They are the regrets of people that he met at the McGovern cocktail party. Rich liberal angst. 

Ted: Yeah, your memories, your own nostalgia, your despair, your anger over the way things turned out are products of a privileged set of expectations. As opposed to the “blood red moon” line, which I think just broadens the spectrum. 

Barry: I don’t think there’s a neat resolution to what Simon is dealing with in “American Tune.” Earlier, you talked about how the song is capacious enough to hold your own interpretations of its imagery. There is the image of the Statue of Liberty, smiling at you as you’re sailing away to sea. What does that really mean? It’s in a dream. And it’s very ambiguous. You can read a lot into that. Does it mean that you’re protected? Does that mean she’s waving bye-bye, and her protection has been lifted? It’s not clear what that means.

 Ted: Yeah. I like the mystery, the unexplained intrusion of the dream into this dour ode. Although it defies sequential logic, the stanza intensifies the felt melancholy and avoids the overly dramatic. Simon—artist and craftsman that he is—knew when to leave it alone and allow the words to resonate as they would. 

Barry: Speaking of being hip, Paul Simon was never considered the hippest songwriter. And yet a song like “American Tune” can endure and be meaningful to people for 50 years. 

Ted: His best work, the major portion of his output, began with the release of Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends album. Simon developed his ear for speech and stopped straining to be poetic and ceased his attempts to make big statements about the human condition. His best songs resonate because Simon wrote credibly, in clear and freshly uncluttered language. You can note his increasing sense of irony, of taking himself less seriously, in expressing relatable experiences in concise, coherent, and pithy ways that were filled with all kinds of melodic hooks, segues, and choruses. Whatever one has to say about Simon, his songs have stood the test of time. I think he’s good because the songs are good. Once he got out of the Simon and Garfunkel cage, as he was starting work on Bookends, he attained the particular genius we know him for. 

Barry: He would say that a lot of those songs on side two (“Fakin’ It,” “Hazy Shade of Winter,” and “At the Zoo”) were failed singles. He was not particularly proud of those songs and wouldn’t perform them live. That was his take on it. 

Ted: The album had some psychedelic Sergeant Pepper-ish stuff for certain elements of the crowd, but besides that I thought it was a very strong album. In the song “America,” it’s become cliché “to look for America.” But I thought the song was just beautifully constructed.

 Barry: The language is very visual, like a movie: “and the moon rose over an open field.” It just sounds good. It’s a wonderful use of words. 

Ted: “It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw.” That’s a line you remember, just a nice use of the place name. And when he does get to his confession, it doesn’t it doesn’t ring false.

 Barry: The imagery in “America” reminds me of “American Tune.” I mean, the narrator of the song wakes up on the bus and he says, “I’m lost.” He says it to his girlfriend who’s asleep. And then he just looks at all the mass of the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. It’s some of the same feeling you get in “American Tune” of just being lost and overwhelmed and not knowing who you are or where you are. It’s like David Byrne saying in “Once in a Lifetime,” “My God, what have I done?”

 Ted: Yeah, maybe it’s just the discovery of suddenly feeling very small. And maybe, in “American Tune,” somebody is talking about that in a disembodied voice, expressing a collective memory where everybody has the same expectations and assumptions that didn’t pan out.

 Barry: The last lines of the song are: “Tomorrow’s going to be another working day/ And I’m trying to get some rest.” You could say that you’re trying to get some rest at least in the hope of getting up tomorrow and making things different. I don’t see a lot of obvious hope in it. But you are carrying on. What’s that Samuel Beckett line? “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

 Ted: Yeah. What are you doing? I’m doing the thing I can’t do. Yeah. I can’t face another day. Yeah, what time is it? I gotta get going! I mean, it’s that kind of thing. You know, I had to revise what I felt at the end of the song. It’s a vague sense of hope. Yeah, tomorrow’s another working day. That’s it. 

Barry: Any final wrap-up thoughts about “American Tune”? 

Ted: I think “American Tune” is a masterpiece by not trying to be a masterpiece. I think it works better than, say, “A Day in the Life.” I think it works better than that as a work of art. It’s something that is sophisticated and subtle, with interesting progressions that come from a Bach chorale. It’s poetic without seeming like it’s trying. It’s professionalism in the best sense. It sounds like a song that Simon cared about. I don’t think there’s a wasted word in there. There’s not a gratuitous line. There’s not a bad image. I think it’s very spare without seeming chintzy. I think it’s poetic without seeming arch. I think it’s transcendent of the conceits of its own time. And it doesn’t drown in its own despair. 

Barry: I agree. There’s a clear-eyed facing up to reality that’s brave in a way. 

Ted: It’s a song by or about somebody who is resilient. But being resilient doesn’t mean that you’re thriving. It just means that you’re able to get up and continue. 

Barry: Well, you know that there’s a new set of facts on the table. And you need to find a new way to engage reality. As the song says, “I’ve certainly been misused.” It’s talking about your bigger involvement in society and, yes, you’re going to keep living. And, yes, you’re going to rest your bones and work. But as far as how you participate in the bigger world, you’re going to draw back a bit; there’s a line that’s been crossed and you’re not going to do that anymore. It seems that America has faced this again and again since “American Tune” was first released. Maybe that’s why the song has never gone away. 

Ted: And the mystery is, is that line going to be crossed? Are you going to be the one to cross it? Or is it going to be for someone other than me, really? Have you done things in this life that will create another way of approaching life situations as they present themselves? A different way of thinking? I think in a lot of ways we have. I think that despite what I’ve said that we have made progress in various fields and parts of the population that have benefited over the last 50-60 years from legislation and activism. But how does that continue from here?

 Barry: Well, that’s another discussion.  And tomorrow’s gonna be another working day, right? 

Ted: So I hear…

Oh No

"

Lennon's going to be here," he shouted to his friend. "I just heard it. John Lennon's gonna be here. Hot damn!" He fidgeted in his seat, took a glance at the Padre game being played and asked, "What inning is it? The ninth? How many more are there?"

KPRI had advertised its San Diego Stadium Ball with an air of self-importance. "The most significant musical event of the year," the ad said, "with many, many surprises." Heading the bill was Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band. The rumor of husband John's appearance never had to be spread by traditional grapevine means. it was assumed from the start that Lennon would show, if to do nothing else but to be wife Yoko's blanket from the brisk San Diego breeze. He had to show. He did the New York Central Park "one to One" concert for retarded kids, hadn't he? And he did it for jailed Michigan John Sinclair, even writing a song about him. San Diego Sickle Cell Anemia clinics could surely count on John's support.

The Incredible Jimmy Smith kicked off the afternoon with a seemingly pointless 40-minute jazz jam. Even though Smith has influenced the technique of many better-known rock keyboard players, he was still plenty pretty uninteresting. Themes of "you Are the Sunshine of My Life" and "Killing Me Softly with His Song" were intertwined by stock Smith lines. The improvisation started to go in circles. Perhaps "The Incredible" should read "The Stagnated."

The stage was at least 50 feet above the audience. You had to crane your neck painfully for any sort of decent view. The presence of backstage people standing in front of the platform did little to alleviae the crowd's sour temper. Enraged freaks pointed derisive gestures towards the stage.

During Papa John Creach's set, people amused themselves with Frisbee tournaments on the baseball diamond. Someone would run the bases, another would throw the dice in the same direction, another would catch a desperate slide to home, and he's safe? Papa John spotted this, laughed, stroked his bow against his electric violin and proceeded with another boogie rave up. His band, Zulu, was tight, though unexciting, and Creach himself had little else to do but play the same ideas he did with the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna.

The audience was restive by this time. "Where's Lennon, goddammit?" a husky voice croaked. Indian war shouts, catcalls and general obscenity filtered through the air.

At last, Yoko was onstage, three bodyguards dressed in black on either side of her as she walked to the platform. Yoko, dressed in white pants and shirt, raised her arms in greeting. The Plastic Ono Band cranked out a methodical beat, while Yoko wailed and flailed her voice against the wind. Her voice was high register warble, uncontrolled: it sounded like squeaking chalk. "Hello, San Diego," she said finally, looking up from her lyric sheets, and then went into a ramble about what she had expected from this town, admitting it was nicer than she anticipated. "Where's John"" someone behind me muttered.

The next song, she explained, was one she wrote to her missing daughter, in hopes she would "pick up the vibrations." Again, the band banged away while Yoko screeched "Don't worry Kyoko" over and over until she started to warble once again. "Woman Power," her women's lib tract began, a quasi-Miles Davis theme with Yoko doing more of the same. The audience began to catch on. Long streams of people headed for the exits. "Let's do a slow blues," Yoko said. The temp was standard blues fair. Yoko sat at the edge of the stage, long hair hanging over half her face. Real sultry like. She didn't sing, but applied her freaky vocalisms to blues cadence. Midway through the "song" she feigned orgasm, breathing heavily and sighing in a painful tone.

The song having ended, she stood up. "All right, see you later," and was gone. No John Lennon. "Let's hear it for Yoko in her first San Diego appearance."

"And her last," someone yelled.

(first published in The Reader, 1973)

LORI BELL plays JOE HENDERSON

It's ’more a case of slipping into a comfy, loose-fitting garment than it is studying Lori Bell’s latest release, Recorda Me: Remembering Joe Henderson. Kicking off with the late jazz saxophone great’s composition ‘Isotope,’” Bell nimbly states the spry signature theme, and one finds oneself unexpectedly wholly immersed in a delightful exchange between the flutist and pianist Josh Nelson. She and the keyboardist weave a delicate and swinging set of variations on it. Nelson’s touch on the keys is light, deft, and swinging, surely over the subdued but percolating tempo provided by bassist David Robaire and drummer Dan Schnelle. Bell is, as she has always been in her distinguished effort, a flutist with unlimited resources who brings her nuanced lines to the fabric that the others have created for her on the opening track. Her playing soars, bringing a different assortment of tonal color to her speedy bop-informed lines and the lyrical blues coloration she often provides in her slower passages.

The album continues in this pleasurable vein, a sagacious offering of deceptively easy grooves and meters. The Lori Bell Quartet has an odd combination in that the allure in this album’s worth of interpretation of Joe Henderson’s compositions lies in the kind of classical precision, yet full of the intricate twists and shifting chord voices that elevate the improvisational acumen of all the players. It’s apparent halfway through the disc that this does not come across as a routine “tribute” to a departed jazz giant as well as projects that—despite good intentions—too frequently seem lifeless or at least absent the grace and luxuriant finesse of whomever the tribute is geared toward.

Bell avoids stifling perfectionism that mars such efforts and lets Joe Henderson’s compositions breathe in a way; the ensemble allows itself to be playful with the music in front of them, undulating with a steady yet continually evolving succession of rhythmic invention. Henderson’s saxophone playing was rich and expressive, versatile and harmonically complex. He had at his disposal an armada of voices that would be brackish and groove, smooth and lyrical, excitingly precise as his compositions required. Deeply rooted in the blues, Henderson’s songwriting used Latin and Afro references, elements creating an insistent and flexible rhythmic basis that made his inventive use of unexpected chord progressions more provocative. His music was one of dynamic but unassuming brilliance.

Recorda Me: Remembering Joe Henderson is stellar work, with the collective readings of Henderson’s “Inner Urge,” “A Shade of Jade,” and the triumph workout on the title track, with its ascending and descending themes and shifting melody contrasts. It is a wondrous effort toward a breathtaking whole: Bell negotiates Henderson’s galloping changes with quicksilver improvisations over Nelson’s sympathetic chordings and counter melodies. His solo outing here in turn is a keen master class in uncluttered elegance. A shout-out as well for the very fine work by drummer Schnelle and bassist Robaire, a rhythm section pursuing a dialogue of their own as meters swerve and sway and swing. Recorda Me does exactly what Bell and her superlative quartet intended, reintroducing listeners to a resourceful and exciting musician and composer. This music moves fast on the uptake, is light on its feet, and is memorable and compelling, rendered with a fervent wholeheartedness by a superlative ensemble.

SOME NOTES ABOUT SOME THINGS: Greil Marcus, The Pretenders, The Rolling Stones, the Love of Music As We Age

Of great interest to readers of rock criticism is a recent an essay by Greil Marcus about why he writes criticism. Although the article mentions that Marcus is a cultural critic, one realizes he remains a rock critic fully invested in the thrill of first hearing the bold assertions of the Stones, Beatles, Dylan, always Dylan. Marcus mentions that he aspires to create something the equal to the music/art that inspires him, an interesting project that he's pursued for many decades. Towards the end he takes up where Mike Bloomfield leaves off after the guitarist's is quoted that something in music or otherwise has to move him in very visceral way; the author takes the same route , insisting that some element, any element, in a work of art has to grab him the seat of his pants and throw him down the stairs. In essence , Marcus has been intellectualizing his raw responses, his method of euphoric recall, and the results, I think, are always intriguing but decidedly mixed. At his best, Marcus performs a kind of Magic, a Ken Burns style that captures period, sound, origins, emotions, and their connection to an overarching American aesthetic and spirit. At worse, it's not that his books are sometimes unreadable, but more that they are unfinishable ; the lack of stated thesis makes his accumulation of data merely an anecdotal stream that do more to detour and distract than reveal. Anyway, Mr. Marcus in his own words:

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1984 brought us the monumental Learning to Crawl by the Pretenders, which, to my mind, established Chrissie Hinde as belonging in the upper echelons of rock singer-songwriters. The songwriting is guitar based and tough, easily matching the esteemed Tom Petty for keeping riffs simple, effective and memorable, and the persona Hinde sustains through the songs is someone looking back with equal measures of regret, fondness and disappointment, but curious about the road ahead , someone taking stock of what she's learned and willing, again, to make the most with the life she's yet to live. This makes her sound too much like The Boss, I suppose, so it's crucial to point out that her experiences, sung in that low, oddly inflected voice that effectively conveys drama, sadness, and a prevailing sense of irony, avoid Springsteen's impulse to make life on life's terms so operatically Spectorish. Hinde's writing is effectively terse, reflective but without wallowing, defiant sans without killing a mood or emotion with bathos and such effects. Not a little like the best of Hemingway, the songs retain an efficiently splintery edge--professional but hardly slick by any means--and the tales pour forth in lean, memorable lines . There is a grit here I find very fine, resilient and appealing through the decades that have past.

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At the height of the Blues Revival, spearheaded by young white artists like Butterfield, Bloomfield, and Clapton and of course John Mayall, there formed an obsession among a sizeable chunk of the audience, it seemed, about what guitarist had the best chops and most outstanding speed. Everything seemed stalemated at the presence of Alvin Lee who, it seemed, exhausted the speed gimmick and turned white blues guitar into a gross parody of the form. Then Johnny Winter's second album, a three sided set called Second Winter, rewrote the rules of the game. His first Columbia album met with mixed reviews and bland receptions from the many who were expecting the next Jimi Hendrix. It was a good blues album, not the best, but not bad. Winter seemed like a continuance of what could have been an Al Capp caricature, a Caucasian albino playing the music of black people. Well ,they all laughed but weren't laughing for long , since the three sides displayed a blues virtuosity unheard of til this time. Winter showed that he had full absorbed the styles of those he considered his guitar masters-all three Kings, Buddy Guy, T-
Bone Walker , Chuck Berry, Luther Allison, Hubert Sumlin--mixed his influences together and created something unique and brilliant in its own right from what he'd borrowed. It was a genuine triumph, a nearly overwhelming demonstration of slick technique, rhythmic invention and rawbone energy.

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There's a difference about caring less about music and no longer loving music that provided the soundtrack of your youth. You may be simply tired of songs and albums that have been overplayed for decades. In that sense, it matters little if I ever hear any Pink Floyd records again, love them thought I do. And half the Led Zeppelin songs can also be consigned to the dustbin. Well, maybe not half, but at least two album sides of tracks I no longer get a thrill from, or songs that were weak to begin with. When you get older, your heroes from yore are no longer bulletproof, considering that by the time I turned 71 I had experienced the situations, loves, traumas , celebrations and catastrophes our friends Dylan, Cohen, Mitchell, Young et al adroitly crystallized in their tune craft. Many of us in the day sat around dark bedrooms and dens with the lights off, stoned or unstoned, listening to the heaviness of the message and thought we were really learning something about life. Aging, though, is the great equalizer , a very efficient means of changing the status and emotional attachments untested youth had on their record collections. Gauged against a few decades of actual lived experience, some songs still resonate , while others pale with revisiting. It helps if you've been a music writer and critic , a habit and occasional part-time job I've indulged myself in over six decades: the unreasonable standards I bring , standards hardly set in stone, has allowed me to have a private canon I can rely on when mood and manners require an unsullied equivalent of the prevailing zeitgeist. Also, it's not necessarily a matter of being uninterested in new music artists as such, as its simply an issue that new music striving for the love of the masses are written for young people and , damn it, I am no longer young. But I do have a considerable record collection. Let it be said that it's a wonderful thing when I can add a new and younger artist to my collection , though the instances are rare.

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The flip side of the Rolling Stones' bad-boy masterpiece 'Jumping Jack Flash" was a vexing yet alluring tune called "Child of the Moon". It was , if I recall , the band's final dalliance in a particular British Psychedellic Pop, an period they flung themselves headlong into with the Satanic Majesties Requests album, foremost of many a band's effort to produce their own Sgt. Pepper. Child of the Moon works perfectly well.A perfect paen to drug-addled mysticism, if you had to call it anything. Rather like that Charlie's drums are upfront and clamoring, maybe even a bit impatient, and the piano and organ work by Nicky Hopkins bob and weave between the hard strummed acoustic guitars. Jagger sounds like a wasted sage struggling to make a pronouncement to a room full of the equally wasted. The song is a perfect example of what the Rolling Stones have done effectively for decades, which was to accentuate their supposed instrumental deficiencies and cut tracks that couldn't imaginably have worked in more "professional" versions. This song has the feeling of you coming into the practice room just when a meandering jam hits its groove and everything gels splendidly for a bit--the tempo has the feeling that it could go astray at any minute and the instruments , while locked in simple themes that produce an attractive audio, don't sound locked into their parts. It could all just collapse , but yet it doesn't , and the result here demonstrates the band's ability to achieve a high aesthetic while never losing that element of being stoned-ruffians with too much cash.

CARE LESS ABOUT MUSIC?

A recent New Republic article ponders if we are caring less about music than we had before, and goes on (and on) investigating possible reasons, causes of the maybe make-believe malaise in the culture. Still, it gets you thinking, and in due course I did a minor bit of autobiographical cogitation to find out why I have a nearly nonexistent relationship with most music by younger artists that's been  released in the last ten years. But lets stay away from the Bad Sociology of the issue and hardly mention , if at all, the intrusion of technology into the pleasure dome. Technology always intrudes into the pleasure dome. 

There’s a difference between caring less about music and no longer loving music that provided the soundtrack of your youth. It may be that you’re simply tired of songs and albums that have been overplayed for decades. In that sense, it matters little if I ever hear any Pink Floyd records again, love them though I do. And half of the Led Zeppelin songs can also be consigned to the dustbin. Well, maybe not half, but at least two album sides of tracks I no longer get a thrill from, or songs that were weak to begin with. When you get older, your heroes from yore are no longer bulletproof, considering that by the time I turned 71, I had experienced the situations, loves, traumas, celebrations, and catastrophes our friends Dylan, Cohen, Mitchell, Young et al adroitly crystallized in their tune craft. Many of us in the day sat around dark bedrooms and dens with the lights off, stoned or unstoned, listening to the heaviness of the message and thought we were really learning something about life. Aging, though, is the great equalizer, a very efficient means of changing the status and emotional attachments untested youth had on their record collections. 

Gauged against a few decades of actual lived experience, some songs still resonate, while others pale with revisiting. It helps if you’ve been a music writer and critic, a habit and occasional part-time job I’ve indulged myself in over six decades: the unreasonable standards I bring, standards hardly set in stone, have allowed me to have a private canon I can rely on when mood and manners require an unsullied equivalent of the prevailing zeitgeist. Also, it’s not necessarily a matter of being uninterested in new music artists as such, as it’s simply an issue that new music striving for the love of the masses is written for young people and, damn it, I am no longer young. But I do have a considerable record collection. Let it be said that it’s a wonderful thing when I can add a new and young artist to my collection.”

SOME COOL OLD MUSIC

I'm Only Sleeping --The Beatles
 The best song about getting up at the crack of noon, only to go right back to sleep. Much is made of the backwards guitar break from Harrison, an accomplishment and innovation indeed, but it's the least interesting aspect of the tune, which as a suitably steady and toned down pulse of a rhythm, simulating, maybe, the measured breathing of someone in deep sleep. McCartney's basswork is superb here, and and at the half point , before the short Harrsion extravaganza, he takes while can be called a bass solo, his only one (unless I miss my guess). Lennon's singing of his lyrics is understated , again suitable in a song that praises laziness; he gets it right, I think, of the universal (?) experience of being awakened in the middle of a dream right before the dreamer gets to the anticipated payoff in the slumbering world. At that moment , in that instance, the world is raw, intrusive, an insane nest of busy body magpies. This is easily one of my favorite songs on a perfect studio release (Revolver),

Ramblin Gamblin Man / Tales of Lucy Blue --Bob Seger System

This is disc got constant play when I lived in Detroit and got even more play after I moved the comparatively edenic San Diego. This 1969 is an earnest and brilliant example of garage band genius, the kind of thrashing primitivism of musicians who definitely not virtuosos who all the same howled, jammed and slammed in minimalist fury all the pent up teen rage of his Michigan fan base. Black Eyed Girl is a gloriously lumbering blues with prime Seger shouting/screaming/bellow, his rasp achieving an appealingly frayed high note, "Ramblin Gamblin Man" is a hard charging rocker with a simple and killer drum beat, all sorts of weird psychedelia , feedback, wah wah pedal orgies, lots of Seger rasping his lungs out. Down Home is    a great companion to the home life portraits by the Stones ala Live with Me. Seger refined his approach over the years to mostly good occasionally great effect, but this album gave he idea that hard rock at ground level should sock you in the jaw and kick you in the head.

Eight Miles High--The Byrds

"Eight Miles High" by the Byrds, released in 1966, a brief and cogent combination of Imagist lyrics, unusual time signatures that alternate between 5/4 and 4/4, jazz and raga overtones and guitarist Roger (nee Jim) McGuinn's transcendent , Coltrane inspired solos. There was a lot of early experiments in mixing rock with other genres, specifically raga and jazz, and not a little hunt and peck improvisation happening during this period, the most succesful efforts being the extended Bloomfield excursions on East West, Larry Coryell's invention of fusion method in the Free Spirits band, and some others, but Eight Miles High was a radio hit of a sort, ranking at 14 in the Billboard 100. It was banned from some stations because of the (too) obvious association with drugs, but where I was in Detroit the tune was played an awful lot on our local AM and FM outlets. It was an unexpected surprise at the time, a song completely unique and ahead of its time that stands as one of the artistically succesful attempts at what would come to be termed fusion.

I Can't Make Love--Wall of Voodoo

 I witnessed Wall of Voodoo for the first time at the Urgh concerts in Santa Monica in 1980, sharing the bill with Pere Ubu, Dead Boys, Magazine,a wholly transformational encounter. The band applied the ticktock reductionist rhythms with a sense of apprehension. It was almost Hitchcockian, as in any scene when a nervous protagonist under duress hears an overly loud clock ticking away . "Ring of Fire" was masterfully drawn out, and Stan Ridgeway seemed to me the best talk-singer since Lou Reed , a flat, hardened monotone , leering and braced by a slight ironic tone, reflecting LA Noir no less than Marlowe. "I Can't Make Love" was my takeaway from the entire night, an underrated lament of A loser, battered on both sides by the lure and dispatch of the affection he craves. This is a lament of someone so saddled with self loathing that he can't complete a sentence. The pleading refrain of "I'm a nice guy" as the song fades is stark and stripped of illusion, it is Lear without the poetry. The abject despair and self-pity that's revealed is equal parts moving and repulsive, which is a remarkable accomplishment.

DWIGHT TWILLEY

Dwight Twilley, underappreciated and (sigh) gone too soon, RIP. I reviewed his single “I’m On Fire” and his second album “Twilley Don’t Mind” in the 70s and always wondered at the time why he and his lifetime music partner Phil Seymour’s earnestly rhythmic and affectless convergence of Mersey Beat melodicism and rockabilly swivel jive, replete with lapel-grabbing hooks, joyously confused vocals and sharp, popping guitar sounds never found a larger audience beyond the first hit and consistently high praise from well-placed rock critics. Office politics at the record company that released his one true hit delayed the release of their debut album, and the time lag sapped the momentum the artists had, but some of it might be that writers didn’t quite get a handle on how to categorize the Twilley Band: they were hailed, sloppily, as members of the “Tulsa Sound”, praised as creators of “power pop”, hailed as fathers of the post-punk New Wave trend, and other times, and more accurately, just called rock and roll. 

As the obit indicates, Twilley was annoyed at the messy attempts to place his music in a category in which it might be made commercially appealing. Just the same, the descriptions of the band’s rock and roll originals were on the money. Perhaps they needed a Jon Landau to write about them and declare that he had seen the face of rock and roll’s future to inspire a major media push for a worthy set of musicians. More likely, the Dwight Twilley Band’s moment had come and gone, with label mismanagement and shifting audience tastes at particular times being blockades. There remains some fine, eternally fresh rock and roll.”

 Well, yes, here it is, another brief plug for the hesitant and the unfamiliar to listen jazz-rock guitar godhead Larry Coryell, a wonderful musician who passed away  in 2017. I've posted a fair number of articles, blurbs, and reviews on the musician's innovations and contributions to not have to go at length again on what makes him an essential addition to anyone's jazz library. Coryell is thought of as a jazz guitarist primarily, but he (and John McLaughlin, separately)  created what came to known as jazz rock (later) fusion guitar improvisation in the early to mid sixties. Coryell's work combined virtuoso jazz technique with a solid grounding in classical and Spanish traditions, which he melded with the raw power of rock, soul, and blues; his speed on the frets was incalculable, his energy unmatched, the course of his manic improvisations unpredictable. He raised the standard  for rock guitarists, again for generations to come, and , I insist, he laid the groundwork for fusion and shred guitarists yet to appear. No Coryell (or McLaughlin), no Van Halen, no Malmsteen, no Holdsworth. A simplistic equation, yes, but it makes the point that Larry Coryell changed the way jazz and rock guitar gets played: he pushed the style a couple of light years into the future. Here's a sample of his careening genius. This piece is from an audition tape he and some bandmates made in the 70s, featuring a bright, rapidly paced, nearly reckless rendition of one of Coryell's finest compositions, "Good Citizen Swallow", a tune he contributed to the Gary Burton Quartet who, who he played for in the mid-Sixties . Those albums, Duster, Lofty Fake Anagram, and Duster , are often argued to be among the important releases that forged a path toward the creation of a new musical genre, fusion. The tune is named for Burton bassist Steve Swallow, a very fine musician and composer in his own right. Coryell's work on this demo tape is lively, unpredictable, with his solo at different stages seeming to channel his inner Keith Richard with some deftly placed split chord chunks, and other times suggesting that he'd listened not a little to James Burton. 

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THE ROLLING STONES ARE AND WERE GREAT AND AFTER SEVEN DECADES, SHUT THE FUCK UP AND ENJOY YOUR MONEY

 

A Bigger Bang was one of those efforts where a legendary but lagging remains of a great rock band pooled what was left of their ingenuity, verve, and grit to patient fans, what, I thought, was a grand and wonderful parting gift. Then, it seems, the Rolling Stones as a creative entity ceased to exist, re-thinking themselves to be a forever touring road show . The goal there seemed only to pack as many stadiums and auditoriums before another one of them bought the farm. It was a canny decision on their part never to announce that they were retiring or that any particular tour or concert was their last dance, as it gave them pause to enjoy their wealth before going back to work. So now the Rolling Stones are releasing a new album , Hackney Diamonds, and a new single, Angry. As a reintroduction to music buyers of the RS as musical force, the new single is all things rote--the famed crossfire guitar work of Richard and Wood neither motivates me to dance, strut, or admire a forever punk attitude--it sounds merely professional, stylistically over-studied, something from a better than average stadiums as possible band. And Jagger goes for the yell-talk-shout style he's made good use of in the past, but his delivery here is no dramatization of a bad scene we can find nuance in; here he has the appeal of someone talking too loud on their phone in a subway car. Not impressed with this, and I can only hope the forthcoming album redeems the last men standing.But now let us consider some of their songs that are great and remain vital and certainly magical through the decades, the days before they became a road show rummaging through a massive songbook.

Child of the Moon:A perfect paen to psychedelic mysticism, if you had to call it anything. Rather like that Charlie's drums are upfront and clamoring, maybe even a bit impatient, and the piano and organ work by Nicky Hopkins bob and weave between the hard strummed acoustic guitars. Jagger sounds like a wasted sage struggling to make a pronouncement to a room full of the equally wasted. The song is a perfect example of what the Rolling Stones have done effectively for decades, which was to accentuate their supposed instrumental deficiencies and cut tracks that couldn't imaginably have worked in more “professional” versions. This song has the feeling of you coming into the practice room just when a meandering jam hits its groove and everything gels splendidly for a bit--the tempo has the feeling that it could go astray at any minute and the instruments, while locked in simple themes that produce an attractive audio, don't sound locked into their parts. It could all just collapse, but it doesn't, and the result here demonstrates the band's ability to achieve a high aesthetic while never losing that element of being stoned-ruffians with too much cash.

Backstreet Girl:I've always been struck by the fascinating disconnect between the folksy, sweetly textured sound of this ballad and all its implications of sublimely expressed dedication and the cruel , misogynist and entitled demands of a man instructing his mistress to know her place, to not contact him for any reason , to be happy with any attention he gives her at all, on his terms only. This works subtly and with a lack of the usual sexist insults that occupy the Stones' more chauvinist material, and I suspect that it's an irony a canny Mick Jagger was working for and achieved. The music suggests Impressionist paintings of a Paris blvd. with the choice addition of accordions to the melody, likely reflects the narrator's attitude, his state of mind, that he's laying the law to a problematic "outside" woman in a manner that is gentle but firm, delicately laid out, even kind in his estimation. The lyrics tell a different story and have the effect of a perfect character sketch that might have been lifted from Dickens or Sterne.

Another lively character study comes to mind:There's no bondage or misogyny in Get Off My Cloud, just the complaints of an impatient young man intensely aware of his awkwardness in the world. The genius here is that Jagger doesn't frame it as a protest song but as an immature rant. That element keeps this song relevant to human experience. Honestly, these songs of scaled-down experience, wicked or melancholic or satiric, are the songs that are the genius of the Stones reputation--that they've been able to rise to new heights from periods of so-so releases is one of the marvels of 20th century music history. But the grand statements--Can't Always Get What You Want, Midnight Rambler, Sympathy for the Devil--have always seemed arch , role-playing and not a little phony and pretentious. In general, I go with what Mailer said about Sympathy for the Devil when it was played for him during a Rolling Stone interview. His view, to paraphrase, was that it was all build up with no pay off. Mailer did, however, go on to say great things about "Live With Me", which he found a funny situation of a daft upper class British household. The Stones, when they cared to work brilliantly withing their limits, had the wit and craft of Wodehouse and Waugh.

ROBBIE ROBERTSON , RIP

Robbie Robertson was a rare bird, and it’s not likely we’ll see a comparable talent again in most of our lifetimes. As a writer, he drew from a deep and flavorful stream of musical styles–field holler work songs, country blues, gospel, old-time jazz with hints of ragtime syncopation, country and western, classic rhythm and blues, and rock and roll–and shared with his splendid Band members the ability to cogently blend the styles into an unaffected, appealing organic sound.

It’s been said before, but his best songs seemed beyond era, as Robertson could have written them one hundred years ago or two weeks ago. They were timeless, evocative, and put one in the center of what was a vividly and deftly portrayed idea of the American South, no less so than Faulkner or Carson McCullers. His lyrics, as well, were dually colloquial and surreal, presented in different guises of melancholy, a yearning for an idealized past, or which displayed an absurdist wit. The Weight is the prize example of Robertson’s talents–a rolling piano figure never far from gospel roots, the narrative details the oddness of small-town life and provides details that suggest hallucinations of religious fervor, incest, hidden insanity. It has the power of a storyboard from which a great novel or grand motion picture can be made. One can set up a half dozen songs by the late songwriter and notice a sublime variety of situations and emotional conflict, and notice Robertson's sure-handed use of first-person narrative, in a tone where someone was speaking about the contradictory elements of their life and how, somehow, the same said narrator was applying their shoulder to the wheel all the same despite the crushing circumstances that present little likelihood of abating. Aspirations, love, better fortunes, happier and more fulfilling years past, Robertson's tales were of the people who fell between the cracks when good times turned ill; often enough it seemed the only reason anyone of the frequently tragic figures in the songs carry on in the grim landscape not through hope or the illusion thereof, but from memory, a nostalgia for days when existence had meaning and a personal refusal to finally die a cipher in the bleak landscape. Robertson was an artist of great and delicate talents that was a large part of why The Band is one of the greatest bands of the rock and roll era. An aspect of Robertson's years ago, that his interest was in characters who were from small towns but who had full lives and palpable experiences, speaking in their unique voices in unpretentious language that suggested full histories without an excess of grandstanding detail. 

His songs were monologues of a sort and were economical in the way people tend to be when recollecting the joys or heartbreaks of the lives they've lived. Robertson had a brilliance for a character sketch ; even his wordiest songs are spare, free of mood killing literary language. He could take himself out of the narrative and let his passion and concern for Southern lives come across in masterfully understated testimonials. His art is, of course, supplemented to no end by the superb contributions of his band mates--Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko, Levon Helm-- and their astounding ability to incorporate so many hard-to-assimiliate genres in material that made a merging of gospel, old school blues, country music and ragtime into a natural and organic expression of musical emotion are the sort of things we can study for years to come, and there will likely remain debates as to the size of the contributions the other members made to the songwriting, but for the meantime I am content to acknowledge the profundity of Robertson's contributions.