Tag Archives: The Beatles

Life and Death From Hank Williams to Townes Van Zandt

Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt

I didn’t plan to submit a column on this topic, but then again I rarely know what will spill out of my slightly scorched and damaged brain cells until I fire up the old 11” MacBook Air, turn up the music, and let my fingers fly. It was actually Christmas Day that seemed most likely to be up for discussion, since I noticed that so many musicians have died on that date through the years. Vic Chesnutt, Eartha Kitt, bluesman Robert Ward, James Brown, Bryan “Snoopy” MacClean from the band Love, Damita Jo, Dean Martin, and Johnny Ace, who shot himself in the head. On the plus side, it’s also a pretty good day for being born: Jimmy Buffett, Merry Clayton, Barbara Mandrell, Dido, Chris Kenner, Tony Martin, and, way back in 1907, Cab Calloway.

Just for kicks I did a fast forward to the first day of the year and lo and behold if there weren’t quite a few musical oddities on New Year’s Day. For example, in 1773 the hymn that became known as “Amazing Grace” was first used to accompany a sermon led by John Newton in the town of Olney in England. It’s the birthday of bandleader Xavier Cugat – that’ll take you back, especially if y’all can remember his wife Charo, who was 41 years younger than him and a regular guest on the Merv Griffin Show – and also Joe McDonald from Country Joe and The Fish.

Things turn dark in 1953 when at age 29 Hiram King “Hank” Williams died right after midnight on New Year’s Day of a heart attack in the backseat of a Cadillac, likely brought on by a lethal cocktail of pills and alcohol. He was transported back to Montgomery, Alabama, in a silver coffin, placed onstage at the municipal auditorium, and it’s estimated that somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000 mourners passed through. His last single, released in November before his death, was “I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive.”

Carl Perkins put out “Blue Suede Shoes” three years later on the same date, and in 1959 Bill Haley and The Comets’ “Rock Around The Clock” soared to number one after it was used in the film Blackboard Jungle. This is the second time the song topped the charts, and although the record business used fuzzy math back then – and probably still does – it’s said it sold over 25 million singles. In that same year, Johnny Cash made his first of several trips to San Quentin prison to perform and was seen by a 19-year-old Merle Haggard, who was serving time for grand theft auto and armed robbery.

On Jan. 1, 1962, The Beatles auditioned for Dick Rowe, head of A&R for Decca Records. He turned them down in what is considered one of the biggest mistakes in music industry history, selecting instead another band who also tried out that day, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. BBC-TV debuted Top Of The Pops in 1964 with the Rolling Stones, Dusty Springfield, Dave Clark Five, The Hollies, and Swinging Blue Jeans. In the United States, in 1965, The Beatles had three albums in Billboard Magazine‘s top ten from Capitol Records.

On the first of January in 1967, the Hell’s Angels put on a concert in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Called the “New Years Wail,” it featured Big Brother and The Holding Company and the Grateful Dead. In 1975, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, Nirvana signed a one-year deal with Sub Pop in 1989, and the following year radio station WKRL in Clearwater, Florida, played Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” over and over for 24 hours.

Townes Van Zandt died on the morning of Jan.1,1997, at 52 years old of a fatal heart attack. The son of a prominent oil family, he endured poverty for much of his life and suffered from mental illness, addiction, and alcoholism. He drifted around from his home state of Texas to Tennessee and Colorado. In a New York Times article published in May 2009, they wrote that “on good nights he seemed to disappear into chronicles of existential joy and agony” and “on bad nights he would fall off his stool onstage, too drunk or high to get through a set.”

In the article Steve Earle, who released a tribute to his mentor titled simply Townes, said “I met him at his absolute peak artistically. He had a really horrible reputation because of his behavior, but I also knew that he had made a decision to write songs at a certain level, that how good the songs were was primarily important to him. I committed to making art whether I ever got rich or not by Townes’s example.”

When Earle himself was sliding deep into his own addiction problems, Townes came to visit and Earle recalls he told him “I must be in trouble if they’re sending you.”

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com .

Headphones and Hair Loss

Pixabay License

Although my kids are grown and I no longer need to buy 200-count boxes of diapers or 10-pound bags of pancake batter mix, I’ve maintained my Costco membership and usually stop by every few months to pick up a few personal necessities and cat litter. Now, realizing that this may fall into the “too much information” zone, I’m going to nevertheless take a chance and share with you a recent revelation: I no longer need to buy shampoo. Ever. Again. Never. Done. It’s over.

With the exception of a small amount of gray fuzz on the sides that I shave off each morning, I’m now as bald as Yul Brenner, Telly Savalas, and that Australian dude from Midnight Oil. I know what you’re thinking … age, genes, and male sexual dihydrotestosterone. But hold your horses, Mister Ed. I suspect a musical connection.

Growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, I went from a crew cut to flat top, a buzz cut to a modified duck-tail pompadour. My three main style influences were Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, and actor Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, who played the parking valet on the television show 77 Sunset Strip and was always combing his hair. He even had a novelty song he did with Connie Stevens – “Kookie, Kookie Lend Me Your Comb” – that was a top ten hit. And while the most popular male hair products on the market back then were Brylcreem (“a little dab’ll do ya”) and Vitalis Hair Tonic, I opted for this one.

On Feb. 9, 1964, millions of American families sat around their black-and-white DuMont or Admiral television sets to watch four moptops appear for the first time on The Ed Sullivan Show. Modestly short by today’s standards, the way they wore and shook their hair when they sang was an aphrodisiac to teenage girls, and a few months later I had grown my hair out over my ears and collar, carried a cereal bowl down the street to the barber shop that I placed on top of my head as a guide, and got my first official Beatle cut.

By the Summer of Love in 1967, men’s hair flowed longer and longer. When the Byrds sang “so you wanna be a rock and roll star,” we all said “yeah yeah yeah” and let it grow despite the social constraints. We all dressed in costumes anyway, so the musicians and audience looked indistinguishable from each other. In England there were Mods, Rockers, and Teddy Boys, and in America it was simply greasers and hippies. My father didn’t speak to me for two years; we ate our meals separately at different times and I wasn’t allowed to get a driver’s license until I got a suitable haircut, which never happened.

After college my career goals were pretty simplistic: I wanted a job where I could always wear jeans, get stoned, and keep my hair long. That led to spending the next 35 years being a music business sales and marketing weasel, with a variety of long hairstyles often tied back into a ponytail. By the late ’90s it had morphed into – God save me – a mullet. I was wearing cowboy boots, drove a Ford Bronco, and was influenced by way too many trips to Nashville. It was the beginning of the end, and it broke my achy breaky heart.

By the time Y2K came rollin’ around, I was sporting a short, combed back Vic Damone thing with an ever-growing spot of skin in the back, and I began to ponder possible solutions. Toupees, hair weaves, restoration, ointments, plugs, and assorted medicinals were considered and tossed aside.

For reasons unknown, India seems to have become the hotbed of new treatments for baldness. There are lettuce and carrot juices to drink, shampoo made from milk and licorice, a process of wearing a paste of seeds and coconut oil in the sun for seven days and something called Binaural Beats, which are frequency modulators that encourage your hair follicles to grow when you listen to them. You can check it out here for free if you’d like, or follow another suggestion I just read about: maintain a regular bowel movement every day.

For the past few years I’ve been rockin’ the bald head with a close-cut Van Dyke beard that’s favored by Ultimate Fighting Champions, border security guards, and dudes who like to take their four-wheelers out into the California desert on weekends. Recently I thought that I finally discovered why I’m bald: it was my darn headphones. Seriously … I read it on the internet. In an article I found from Seventeen published last year, a “celebrity hairstylist” named Castillo claims that wearing over-the-ear headphones can rough up your hair strands and cause them to break off. Another credible authority called Hub Pages speculates that “traction alopecia usually happens when there is a strain on the hair, so if your headset is pulling your hair or putting undue stress on your hair in some way, you could risk losing your hair to this method of hair loss.”

Don’t believe any of it. All these theories have been debunked by scientists. Mystery solved and this case is closed. Headphones, earbuds, or going to see live music will absolutely not cause your hair to fall out. On the other hand, it could lead to hearing loss. What? Huh? Did you just say something?

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #9

Easy Ed’s Broadside column has been a fixture for over ten years at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

Both a Tribute and Compilation, The National Gives Us A Day of The Dead.

national-grateful-dead In my previous life as a sales exec for music distributors and record labels which ended in 2007, among my responsibilities during the last eleven years of a thirty-five year career was representing several record labels that specialized in ‘tribute’ albums. I put quotations around the word because in reality they were nothing of the sort. The premise for a majority of the releases were simply a quick money grab of getting record stores to take just one or two copies and drop it into the artist’s bin to target the completist…those fans that would buy anything.

It was a formula that worked pretty well as long as there were enough stores with enough space to add them into their inventory, and each label had their own specialty. One would try to find at least one living member of a defunct band, throw them into a studio with session players and crank out new versions of old songs. Another did straight, cheap soundalikes that sold at bargain prices especially in places like military PX’s and onboard ships. Yet another took a different path, by bringing out a series of well-produced bluegrass recordings, and later adding string quartets and infant-ized lullabies to the concept.

In today’s world of streaming, most music is consumed not as a complete album but individually as a song, as well as being programmed for the listener as part of someone’s curated playlist. So unless you’re Drake or Taylor Swift or Adele, you’re not going to sell six digits of albums anymore, and judging from looking through last week’s charts, you’re a success if you make it to just a thousand albums.

DOTD Against that backdrop, along comes an overly-ambitious real, honest-to-God Grateful Dead tribute release that targets not only a very specific buyer of a band that still has a rabid following, but also is tied to a charity known for doing such projects to raise money for HIV and AIDS awareness and research…the Red Hot Organization. Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National curated the set and there is also a performance scheduled at the second annual Eaux Claires Festival on August 12-13.

Being a retired Deadhead who grew weary of the scene back in the early eighties, yet each month still rotates a few dozen tracks in and out of my core iPhone playlist, this set was one that called my name and I’ve been navigating my way through the five-plus hours of music. What I wish I could tell you is that I loved each and every note, but after two weeks of daily listening it has driven me back to my vast digital Dead library in search of the real deal.

Not to say that this set isn’t worthy of a spot on your shelf, because the high spots far exceed the not-so-high ones, and hearing younger artists who were not even born when the Dead first came together re-invent these songs with different instrumentation and arrangements is like digesting a handful of ear candy. And the thirty or forty bucks it’ll cost you goes to an important cause, so there’s that too.

In addition to some of tunes I’ve placed here, there’s already a Wiki page that lists all the songs and artists. Check it out and then head over to the Day of The Dead site for more information.

Every Picture Tells A Story.

Sandy 2 The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….like this one.

The Last Words On Guy Clark.

guy-clark-1

Guy Clark’s biographer and documentarian, Tamara Saviano, posted this letter on her Facebook page May 28th, just over a week after Guy’s passing. It’s a rare public sharing of something very personal to her, his family and friends, and it is so touching I’m going to reprint it here.

Dear Everyone,

It’s been a wild couple of weeks, months really, with Guy’s decline and death. I’ve spent almost every minute of the last 10 days coordinating and planning. Now, finally, I have some downtime on this long and appropriate Memorial Day weekend to spend some time alone to grieve.

Guy had suffered from a long list of health problems—lymphoma, heart disease, diabetes, and bladder cancer among them—and we were lucky to have him years longer than we’d expected. The last three months of his life were especially brutal; he spent most of them in a nursing home. By the end, Guy’s only goal was to go home to die—to be in the place he loved, surrounded by his art, books, and music. With the help of friends and hospice workers, he made it.

It didn’t become real to me until I saw Guy’s body at the funeral home two days after his death. In the last months, he had become thin and frail. Yet, plumped up with embalming fluid, he looked like Guy Clark again. How weird is that? Because he was going to be cremated, he was laid out in a simple box just for a short time so a few of us could see him. The funny thing is, Guy is so dang tall they had to take his boots off to fit him in the box. The top of his head was pressed against one end of the box and his feet pressed against the other. Guy Clark does not fit in a box.

Guy’s last wishes were clear. At some point in his waning years, his lyrical request —“Susanna, oh Susanna, when it comes my time, won’t you bury me south of that Red River line” —changed to instructions to be cremated, with his cremains sent to Terry Allen to be incorporated into a sculpture. “I think that would be so fucking cool,” Guy said at the time. “Sure, leave me with a job to do,” Terry joked.

But it’s no joke now. In the days after his death, Guy’s closest friends pulled together a plan to honor his wishes. Jim McGuire hosted a wake—a typical Guy Clark picking party, one of many that took place at McGuire’s studio over the years. Guy’s family and Nashville friends gathered around an altar on which we’d placed his ashes, his old boots, and our favorite picture of him, and we took turns playing Guy Clark songs. At the end of the night, Verlon led a chorus of “Old Friends” that knocked the wind out of the room.

At midnight, Verlon, Shawn, McGuire, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Guy’s son, Travis, his caregiver, Joy, and I boarded a tour bus in Nashville that would take us—and Guy—to Santa Fe and Terry Allen. Guy’s last road trip. We slept little during the 18-hour drive; we all had too many Guy stories we wanted to tell. Grief shared is grief diminished.

We arrived in Santa Fe in time for dinner on Wednesday, May 25. Terry, his wife, Jo Harvey, and their son, Bukka, hosted another wake. Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill, Lyle Lovett, his partner, April Kimble, Robert Earl and Kathleen Keen, Joe and Sharon Ely, their daughter, Marie, Jack Ingram, and painter Paul Milosevich flew in from all parts to be there. We set up another altar, gathered around and told more Guy stories.

After a feast of green chili enchiladas, tamales, guacamole, and homemade salsa, we huddled around a fire pit on the stone and adobe patio. Hanging wisteria perfumed the air as old friends toasted Guy, clinking glasses of wine against bottles of Topo Chico and cans of Robert Earl Keen beer. Under a night sky blanketed with stars, a guitar came out. This time there was a rule, and it was simple. “Play a song Guy would have made you play,” Steve said. Three among this group had written songs about Guy. Shawn sang “This Guy, Guy,” written with Gary Nicholson. (They got to play it for Guy shortly before his death. When they’d finished, he deadpanned, “Well, isn’t that cute.”) Next, Verlon played his ode, “Sideman’s Dream.” Then Vince shared the song he wrote, “There Ain’t Nothing Like a Guy Clark Song,” one that provides a perfect benediction to the master songwriter’s life. Through these songs—and many more of his own—there’s no doubt Guy Clark will live forever.

Guy Clark doing his song “Magnolia Wind” with Shawn Camp and David “Ferg” Ferguson as a birthday party for Cowboy Jack Clement winds down one Nashville night around 10 years ago.

Record Store Memories Revisited.

My Broadside column over at No Depression last week was about those wonderful places of my youth back in Philadelphia where I spent much time and money pursuing new music that eventually turned into a job.

Here’s a couple of paragraphs but if you’d like to read the whole thing, click here.

I literally stumbled into a career the last day of college — the job description was “go to record stores.” My new boss gave me the keys to a 1972 VW Beetle, a list of about five hundred stores from DC to New York, three-ring binders of catalogs, and boxes of promos, and he sent me off to sell.

I started with King James and Bruce Webb’s in the city, moved out to Bryn Mawr near the Main Point, to visit Plastic Fantastic, and Keller’s House of Music in Upper Darby. Al’s Record Spot and Levin’s Furniture in Kensington. Mel’s in South Philly. There was Speedy’s and Phantasmagoria in Allentown, the Renaissance in Bethlehem, Spruce Records in Scranton, and Central Music in Williamsport. There was Waxie Maxie, Kemp Mill, Discount Records, and Music Den. There was Eynon Drug Store, Gallery of Sound, and H. Royer Smith’s classical shop, where I scored Skip Spence’s Oar album, which they’d had sitting in the basement.

Ska, A Jamaican Contribution to World Music.

Last February on the Black Girl Nerds website I found this article written by Kevin Wayne Williams. While it focuses on ska, it is a vast survey of music from the island that also touches on mento and reggae. It is absolutely worth your time to check out and includes a ton of links.

This was published for Black History Month, and I’ll start you out but you need to click here for the full story.

When you go back in history, ska was an exclusively black musical genre, an offshoot of mento. Mento, a Caribbean music style noted for its syncopated rhythm (essentially a series of off-beat triplets), was usually played by small groups: typically a vocalist, a tongue-drum, a banjo, and a guitar. It’s a cousin to calypso music, and, despite being rhythmically distinct, the two forms were generally marketed as calypso in the US: most Harry Belafonte songs were actually mento, not calypso.

In the late 1950’s, Jamaican musicians began to incorporate American R&B sounds into mento, and the hybrid form stabilized on using the same syncopated structure with an even stronger off-beat chord known as the skank (bonus info for music theorists: the skank in ska is nearly always a major chord, while in reggae it’s generally a minor chord). Typical instrumentation was a guitar, a bass (sometimes a bass guitar, but just as often a concert bass), drum, saxophone, trumpet, and trombone: still the core ska band today, although some bands have much larger horn sections. Many of the musicians of this era are familiar today as reggae and rocksteady musicians: Bob Marley probably being the most famous to American audiences, with names such as Toots Hibbert (reputed to have actually invented reggae) and Desmond Dekker still having some familiarity.

Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.

The Elvis Costello Immersion

I’ll admit I’m a bit late to the game as I just recently sat down and watched Mark Kidel’s documentary Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance that was first broadcasted on the BBC television network back in November 2013 and is currently running on America’s Showtime network. Along with all of the press and publicity surrounding Elvis’ autobiography, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (published Oct. 13, 2015, by Blue Rider Press), and its companion “soundtrack” of the same name, it’s been hard to keep from bobbing and weaving this man. Considering Costello is pretty close in age to me, and was a nine-year-old member of the Beatles’ fan club, his story offers an interesting and compelling, comparative and conflicting musical genealogy chart. I have yet to read the book, but if Mystery Dance is any indication, it will be an exercise in delight and wonder. For all the things Costello is or isn’t, has or hasn’t been … he has lived up to Stephen Thomas Erlwine’s description of him on AllMusic.com as an utterly fascinating “pop encyclopedia.”

There is little need for me to regurgitate Costello’s entire biography and discography since we all know how to leap over to his Wikipedia page with the click of a mouse, trackpad, or finger. But an interesting place to start is with his father, Ross MacManus — a musician and bandleader back in the 1950s. In 1970, he recorded a version of the Beatles’ “Long and Winding Road” under the pseudonym of Day Costello. That’s where that half of Elvis’ name comes from.

While I’m not from England, it seems that if you are, you know the theme song to a commercial for R. White’s Lemonade called “Secret Lemonade Drinker,” in which Ross plays drums and sings background vocals. This is a remake of the ad from 1993, in which Ross plays the starring role in two versions.

https://youtu.be/DnxLjbwmJjM

My own dad was a mechanical engineer who liked big bands, Frank Sinatra, Mario Lanza, and Herb Albert and The Tijuana Brass. Our house was always filled with music from either his Dumont high fidelity system, the older sister’s phonograph with Elvis — that would be Presley — 45s spinning around and around, or my own transistor radio pulling in Jerry “The Geator with the Heater” Blavat on WHAT-AM as he played “songs from the heart, not a playlist.” I’ll tell you, my childhood simply could not have been anywhere near as cool as that Costello house: having a performing musician for a dad. To that point, as Gerard O’Donovan wrote in The Telegraph with regards to Mystery Dance:

Mark Kidel’s film was a deftly constructed trip through a restless, shape-shifting career, allowing Costello to revisit significant moments of his past. But it couldn’t be called a full biography as it only ever touched on the personal in order to shed light on the musical journey. Even so, it was particularly good at bringing out the extent to which Costello was drenched in music from birth, and the enormous influence his musician father Ross (a stalwart of the Joe Loss Orchestra) had not only on his tastes but also his rebellious determination not to sing “other people’s songs” but to write and perform his own.

Forgive me for the diversion, as I’ve just taken four paragraphs to get to this memory chip from 1977, when My Aim is True was released. A few months later, Costello performed it at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey — which my spellcheck poetically prefers to spell out as “Prosaic, New Jersey.”

At first I really hated that Costello used the name Elvis and that he wore glasses, a sport jacket, and tie to evoke those Buddy Holly publicity shots. Or perhaps he was trying to evoke Peter and Gordon or Chad and Jeremy?

But I laughed at the joke that he was marketed and hyped as punk rock, a now-and-then laughable, antiquated term, right along with the Sex Pistols, Ramones, Clash, Television, Jam, and any other safety pin of the week. Unlike the others, he was pure pop. And although time has shown that he has an incredibly enormous songwriting and performance vocabulary, at the end of the ’70s, Costello was cranking out the cheesiest and most embarrassing videos for TV.

For the next two decades, I think I bought every single Costello album he released, even if I only listened to them once. I never fell in love with any of them at the time, which was my mistake. Most were brilliant, or at least had something on them that was uniquely different from anything else at the time. But the song below is what finally tipped me. It comes from the series of concerts that were later released as The Harry Smith Project: The Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited.

Now, I know you aren’t going to spend 13 minutes watching something amazing; this is the damn internet and nobody has the time. So please just go with me to 9:14 (you’ll foolishly miss Kate and Anna McGarrigle at 5:36, but that’ll be your cross to bear) and behold the first revelation of how I finally “got” Elvis Costello.

In the past two weeks I have loaded onto my iPhone 25 Elvis Costello albums (with the exception of The Juliet Letters, which is an altogether different story). They are squished into a playlist with over 100 original Carter Family songs taken from an XERA border radio transcription as well as some Hank Snow, Patsy Montana, Charlie Louvin, Rose and the Maddox Brothers, Ernest Tubb, Charlie Poole, Skillet Lickers, Norman Blake, Suzie Glaze, Bob Dylan, and Iris DeMent. Costello is a bloke among the folks.

The algorithm of the shuffle feature allows for one in three to be an Elvis Costello track, and each one is like reaching into a bowl of candy and pulling out a dark chocolate covered almond with sea salt and caramel. Delicious. It’s an infused immersion I can hardly get enough of.

This was originally published at No Depression dot com, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.

Photo by James O’Mara