Lately, some friends have been asking what I'm doing. My answer is, I've been trying to pitch in more -- plus keep in touch with family and friends -- plus follow the Mets. That does not leave much time for feeding my personal beast on the Web. *** We've also been discovering the little treasures that pop up on the two public channels in our area -- Channel 13 and WLIW21. For a year or two, we were caught by a Swedish series, "Before We Die" -- Stockholm cops, Euro crime family, tangled family ties -- that gave me chills I had not experienced since "The Sopranos." (Later, a British version of "Before We Die" proved to be a gabby failure.) This past winter we got hooked on a French series, "Astrid et Raphaëlle," about a Paris cop who notices that an office worker is autistic, and has the ability to notice and decipher clues, physical and psychological. Before long, the inspector is taking Astrid along on cases -- relying on her intuition. I often wonder how Astrid, the French-Norwegian actress, Sara Mortensen, manages to change gears from her introverted persona when she goes back into the real world. *** As a former news reporter, I am fascinated by the police methods in "Before We Die," and "Astrid et Raphaëlle." And that brings me to "The Brokenwood Mysteries," in a small New Zealand town that seems to have more than its share of characters -- golfers, actors, a snarky young Maori guy -- and an extraordinarily high murder rate. Good grief, we once visited friends in Wellington for a week, and NZ seemed like the most civil place in the world. The Brokenwood series began a decade ago, without my knowing, and at some point there was a new inspector with his own dark side-- Niall Rea, who makes no secret of his past divorces (three? five?) and he admits he deserved every one of them. He also has well-developed detective skills, and quickly makes the judgment that the local assistant, played by Fern Sutherland, is smart and brave, and he treats her with respect. I like the New Zealand police series whereas I scorn the British detective series on the tube because the folksy bumpkin detectives are always explaining things to the suspects. Shut up, already. Detectives keep things to themselves; they do not conduct therapy sessions for their suspects. In a recent episode from "Brokenwood," a suspect is entitled to a suave lawyer, who protects his client, Just like real life. The most recent episode of "Brokenwood" had a country music theme -- the regional star breaks the news that she is moving to, of course, Nashville. Needless to say, she does not live out the night. With my background of helping write Loretta Lynn's autobiography, "Coal Miner's Daughter," traveling around with the Loretta entourage, I am familiar with the fans -- known as "the bugs" to my old musician pals on Loretta's bus. Rea's detective, himself a country buff, notes that avid fans know everything about the mysteries and jealousies of the traveling band. "Brokenwood" was filmed a decade past, and the personnel has moved on. If the inspector and the assistant fall for each other, please do not tell me. *** More public TV: Irish music, including including a series of intimate performances in lovely Irish castles, in a series called "Tradfest." The interviewer is Fiachna Ó Braonáin, a longtime member of the great Irish band, Hothouse Flowers. My wife and I love how the musicians respect each others' work. So that's what I've been doing in my spare time, instead of typing. I wondered what the young people thought of Joni Mitchell, in her survivor’s voice, tapping her survivor’s cane, finding the gravelly notes that worked so well.
Rows and flows of angel hair And ice cream castles in the air And feather canyons everywhere Looked at clouds that way Lyrics. Ideas. Imagination. Joni once wrote a song about a party on a Grecian isle, another song about a roadhouse, dancing with a coyote. She was young, now she is old, having survived an aneurysm, Sunday night presiding on a throne, at the Grammys, accompanied by Brandi Carlisle. Queen Joni. And Stevie Wonder, singing a duet with the late Tony Bennett, who died this year at 96. The music is part of our lives. I remember being 10 or so, hanging out with a couple of Italian cousins in Queens, and an older sister was raving about a concert she had attended, “by that crazy Tony Benedetto from Astoria.” The necrology continued – performers who made us happy, or sad, or thoughtful, sometimes all at once. Gordon Lightfoot, whose “Early Morning Rain” made me homesick for New York while living in other people’s town. Andre Watts, so young, taking over Carnegie Hall on a Sunday afternoon, so long ago. Sinead O'Connor, one more reason to treasure the Irish passports we keep up to date. Harry Belafonte – we saw him once on a hot, still summer night in Forest Hills in the 60s. Astrud Gilberto – we saw her in a club on the East Side of Manhattan. Robbie Robertson – I saw him with The Band, four or five places, and in the classic movie, “The Last Waltz.” A recently svelte Oprah Winfrey orated an elegant tribute to Tina Turner, who died this past year, and Oprah praised her music, yes, and also her courage in getting free, and all that entailed. My pal Vic Ziegel and I saw Tina and Ike Turner in a club, I think on North Beach. She was on her way. This night in LA in 2024 also belonged to the young female stars receiving their awards, wearing bits of costume here and there, as they danced up to the stage. Then there was Taylor Swift, recently seen at a football playoff game, cheering her star boyfriend, throwing sour terror into paranoid MAGA types. She said she was going backstage to be photographed with her newest trophy, for her next album cover. You go girl. An early live highlight was Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs, a generation or more apart, playing off each other on her hit song, “Fast Car.” She was so poised, and smiling, with her gray hair. He was gristly and respectful, injecting enough of his bio – Thomas Wolfe’s hilly North Carolina, Appalachian State University, (where he worked as a bouncer), then migrating, as pickers do, to Nashville. As Combs blended with Chapman, I could hear my friend Loretta Lynn nodding enthusiastically and pronouncing, “Now that’s country.” Her highest compliment. As the evening went on, I felt respect for Trevor Noah for maintaining his poise, his intelligence, his sanity. Imagine this night with a lesser host I willed myself to stay awake until the closing by Billy Joel, looking old, but rocking to his standard, “You May Be Right.” I can remember my brother-in-law telling tales of growing up in the same square mile of Long Island as Billy Joel, and how Brenda and Eddie were real people. As the show ended, I was happy that Joni Mitchell….and Tracy Chapman….and Stevie Wonder….and Billy Joel were still making music. Now it was okay for this old guy to fall asleep. ### In the terrible year of 1968, with war raging in Vietnam, with MLK and RFK being assassinated, a sound emerged from a funky pink house in the Catskill mountains that some of us had been awaiting, whether we knew it or not. “It’s like you’d never heard them before and like they’d always been there,” Bruce Springsteen would say, several decades later. This is true. I can attest to the feeling of desperation in the late ‘60s, and how it was tempered by the music from five troubadours – one from Arkansas and four from Canada. (Toronto was a melting pot for music that would be heard around the world.) The five musicians brought their separate gifts, in a visual mishmash of floppy country thrift-shop clothes, indistinguishable in their very white slouches. But gradually we sorted out Richard Manuel from Rick Danko from Levon Helm – the token southerner -- from Garth Hudson – now the last survivor, with his weird beard and instrumental sounds – and from Robbie Robertson, who died Aug. 9 at the age of 80. Robertson’s life is captured in the excellent NY Times obituary by Jim Farber: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/arts/music/robbie-robertson-dead.html Robertson came off as the dominant Band member in the documentary, “The Last Waltz,” by Martin Scorsese, which was made as the Band broke up, with a glorious final concert cast, in San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom on Nov. 25, 1976. Scorsese was obviously taken by Robbie Robertson’s charisma and intelligence and ambition, which helps explain why the boys were breaking up the band. When the movie was released in 1978, Marianne and I took our youngest, David, to see it in The Village (Dave clarifies all in his comment, below) -- the start of a family tradition. Every year at Thanksgiving, David pops in a DVD of “The Last Waltz,” as we give thanks for life and also the music and point of view of the Band, including Jaime Royal "Robbie" Robertson. I had a few glimpses of The Band. In 1974, as a news reporter, I was assigned to cover the Long Island and Manhattan stops of a national tour by Bob Dylan, and the five musicians who had melded as members of Dylan’s band. The only Band member I actually met was Levon Helm, when he was cast by Michael Apted to portray Loretta Lynn’s father in the movie, “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Another time, I saw Danko and a haggard Manuel perform at a Pete Fornatale fund-raiser for a food charity, in the Village, not long before Manuel committed suicide. In 1980, there was a “grand opening” for the movie “Coal Miner’s Daughter” in Nashville. Maybe a bit sloshed, Levon played backup to Loretta and Sissy Spacek as they sang some of Loretta’s greatest hits. He was so modest, did not need attention. I never did meet or eyeball Robbie Robertson, but his mystique grew in his post-Band years. People came to know that his mother, Rosemary Dolly Chrysler, was a Mohawk, raised on the Six Nations Reserve near Toronto. His actual father (who died young in a car accident) was not named Robertson but rather was a gambler who was Jewish. “You could say I’m an expert when it comes to persecution,” Robbie Robertson wrote in his memoir, “Testimony,” issued in 2016. One of my favorite Robbie Robertson songs is “Stage Fright,” about a singer – maybe Bob Dylan himself, who comes off very nicely in Robertson’s book, offering a functional car to the young guitarist coming to play backup in Dylan’s band. https://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+stage+fright+the+band&rlz=1C1GTPM_enUS1061US1062&oq=lyrics+stage+fright&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgAEAAYgAQyBwgAEAAYgAQyBggBEEUYOTIICAIQABgWGB4yCggDEAAYhgMYigUyBggEEEUYPNIBDzEzMDU5MzU3NTRqMGoxNagCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Others think the song is about young Robbie Robertson himself. Still coalescing as a band, the five musicians made a pilgrimage to a soul-music center in Arkansas, and invited Sonny Boy Williamson for some soul-food in a Black neighborhood. Home-boy Levon tried speaking polite Arkansan to a couple of white cops, only to have the five run out of town. Another of my favorite Robbie songs is “Acadian Driftwood,” about French settlers on the Canadian coast, some of whom later migrated southward to join relatives in Louisiana, only to realize they were still outsiders: “Set my compass north, I’ve got winter in my blood.” As the settler prepares to go “home” to Canada, the language shifts into French: “Sais tu, Acadie j'ai le mal du pays” (Do you know, Acadia, I'm homesick.) In later decades, Robertson performed and wrote music that reflected his Mohawk genes: https://www.samaritanmag.com/musicians/qa-robbie-robertson-why-he-kept-quiet-years-about-his-heritage In his later years, Robertson gravitated to Los Angeles, but he continued to write and perform songs that spoke for outsiders, including himself -- part shtetl, part rez. ### Thursday: George Wilson, our grandson, has written about the music that a 26-year-old is following. I asked him, and he came through, overnight. His comment is around 23rd in the queue. GV Ever since the pandemic began – seems like decades – I had been mourning the music I stashed on my beloved MiniDisc Recorder and Player. Something was wrong – not batteries, not one bad diskette, but serious mechanical stuff, or so I thought. My music. For some people, music is the heartbeat of life, the faithful companion, in our ear, as we exercise or daydream. The MiniDisc allows some obsessive types to download and program favorite songs, favorite concertos – (I plead guilty.) Bad enough my wife and I have not dared see friends or go into the City. But no MiniDisc library, either? I was told via the Sony support site that this device from 1998 was neither being manufactured nor repaired – the story of our throwaway times. But the other day, I gave it a try, and for some obscure reason, when I popped in two new AA batteries and a trial disk, programmed by moi, familiar sounds flooded into the taut little headset, and my ears. A miracle cure. ![]() This meant, first of all, that I could re-visit treasures I had recorded live from the radio, back in the day –particularly treasures from Peter Fornatale’s weekend show on WFUV-FM. Pete is gone now; he was a friend and neighbor, and we used to take walks together along Bar Beach, and he would talk about thematic shows he was preparing: *- One entire two-hour Sunday show about flying – including, of course, Arlo Guthrie’s classic, Coming Into Los Angeles. *-- Another two-hour special all about the Sunday papers -- including Adam Carroll’s homage to Blondie and Dagwood, that eternally married couple, with loving tribute to hard-working Blondie (“You’re looking pretty good for a girl of 82.”) * -- Plus two entire hours of “Ladies Love the Beatles,” – with Pete lavishly lingering over the title. The highlight, a cover of “All My Loving,” (linked here), by the great Christine Lavin. (Pete introduced us, and that wise, generous troubadour is still out there on the hustings.) I know there are other sources of music. I've got pop and classical music on my iPod, but have no clue about more recent sources. The joy of the MiniDisc is that you can be your own disk jockey, on your own whim or wisdom. In my little shoebox of sound I have gift disks programmed by Laura from Upstate, including a classic by Keb Mo’ – “More Than One Way Home” – listen to me, play this once a day, for your health -- and from Kathleen in Texas, a collection including “La Bamba,” by the real Ritchie Valens. So now, by some miracle cure from the great deity of out-of-supply MiniDiscs, on a warm Presidents’ Day, I went for a walk and chose a diskette I had programmed a few decades back: 1- Lovin’ in My Baby’s Eyes by Taj Mahal. 2- Room Off the Street by Suzanne Vega. 3- Fanette, with Shawn Elliott, from original “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well. (evoking memories of the late 60s when my wife drove into the Village for a Sunday matinee.) 4- Estate, Susannah McCorkle, the late polylingual singer-writer, about gloomy endless Summer (“Estate,” Italian for “Summer.”) 5- Along the Verdigris, Tom Paxton and Iris Dement. I was writing a feature about the latest album by the Oklahoma-born folk singer, and he and his wife Midge delivered the cassette, and I was touched by this song, plus the backup by an unforgettably piercing voice. “You don’t know Iris DeMent?” they asked. 6- “Sweet Is the Melody,” by Iris DeMent, from Paragould, Ark. her ode to a dance hall, “A Friday-night romance, forgetting the bad stuff and just feeling good.” 7- “Like Everyone She Knows.” James Taylor. 8 –“Talk About It.” Anna and Kate McGarrigle. Another weekend/dance song. (I’m still mourning Kate.) 9 –“I Can’t Make You Love Me,” with Bonnie (3 Grammys) Raitt, and Bruce Hornsby, memorably. 10 – “Twenty-Third Street,” by Bill Morrissey, with his raspy voice, a man in a bar missing a woman who is living somewhere uptown. 11 – “I Will Always Love You,” by Dolly Parton. When I first saw her, backstage at the Opry, she was a shy mountain girl, still singing with Porter Waggoner. The legend is, she wrote this about moving on from Waggoner. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. Dolly aces all the other versions. 12- “Last Man on Earth,” by Loudon Wainwright. A declaration of manhood. 13– “The Scent of Your Cologne.” By Christine Lavin – on an elevator, catching a whiff of the fragrance used by her late, adored father. (On Christine’s “Shining My Flashlight on the Moon” album.) 14- “Raglan Road,” by Roger Daltrey and the Chieftains – about the pangs of love in Belfast, during the Time of Troubles. (You could also find a classical-sounding version by the great Loreena McKennitt, Irish-Canadian.) 15 – “Forever Young,” Bob Dylan and the Band. The Thanksgiving ritual. I know, I know, there are more contemporary ways to program music -- including my iPod with thousands of classical and folk, samba and soul. But that collection has been swallowed up in the mysteries of Apple Music, so no way for me to edit. Whatever. I'm now back in business with all those disks, two decades old, containing Dvorak, Britten, Stevie Wonder, Bocelli, Loretta Lynn. Grateful Dead. No matter what comes down…outwalk the pandemic....put one foot in front of the other. *** My overnight thought: Do the people a favor and put Keb Mo' right here, one click away. *** On the same weekend, hiding indoors from the cold, we were fortunate to catch two live shows dedicated to music -- both bristling with talent and energy. The radio show was on Friday, a live performance from Carnegie Hall, featuring Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Mutter Virtuosi, her ensemble of young musicians. The show was broadcast by WQXR-FM, the gem of a classical station which has recently enlarged its program of live performances. Not only that, but the station often assigns two of its assets, Jeff Spurgeon and John Schaefer, to be co-hosts. (Spurgeon is known for his witty three-minute synopses of upcoming operas; Schaefer is known for his esoteric taste in new recordings.) The two were posted in the wings of the historic hall, as the musicians walked toward stage, nervous tension crackling through our Bose FM radio at home. Because the concert was on the radio, we could not see which of her bright gowns Mutter had chosen, to go with her energy (and, dare I say it, her beauty) but the music reminded us why Mutter has been one of the best violinists in the world, for four decades, since her mid-teens. Mutter was the driving force in pieces by Vivaldi, Unsuk Chin, and Saint-Georges, a composer of Senegalese ancestry, who was a few years older than Mozart. The co-hosts told us that Saint-Georges is the subject of a forthcoming movie, “Chevalier,” due to be released in April. After the break, Mutter led the ensemble through a bristling version of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” and then the audience (this was, after all, Carnegie Hall) was treated to three encores. Finally, the musicians filed off the stage, punctuated by shoes scuffling and satisfied fragments of chatter. Schaefer likened himself to a sports broadcaster in a clubhouse, watching and interviewing athletes after a good performance. Mutter herself stopped and gave a proud baseball manager’s critique of her players, generous with her time for Spurgeon and Schaefer. In our living room, my wife and I applauded – for the leader, for the ensemble, and for the two hosts. Bravo, WQXR. Bravo! *** Two evenings later, we found a warm corner in our house to watch the Grammy awards. We are acutely aware of being, how can I say this, out of it. We don’t know the contemporary pop music that our kids and grandkids choose, but my wife has been an early fan of Adele, and I had heard that Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson were on the card, and that Bonnie Raitt was up for a few awards. Quite enough. We marveled at the star power of Lizzo and her group -- "Big Grrrls" – and we could detect the intelligent sizzle from Taylor Swift – and I wondered why the dynamic singer from Puerto Rico is named Bad Bunny – and we frankly didn’t think Harry Styles has much of a voice. Or does that matter?
But Stevie Wonder had the same impact that he did 50 years ago when he was “Little Stevie Wonder” – and Smokey Robinson could still rock. When Grammy-winner Kim Petras announced that she was the first trans woman to win an Oscar, I could not help but wonder what Gov. DeSantis of Florida – that scowling, ignoramus latter-day George Wallace wannabe -- was thinking, if he was watching. Will he ban the Grammys next year? Or CBS itself? Then came the spectacle – an anniversary celebration of hip-hop – 50 years? Really? A lot of gents with attitudes and costumes, names and faces I sort of recognized, came bounding onto the stage, chanting things that merited a quick and frequent network finger on the bleep key. Frankly, I was spellbound by the procession. Wish I had somebody to explain who they were and what they stood for. But…but…I liked them. Keep bouncing, guys. Beyoncé arrived late. The word was that she got stuck in LA traffic. I didn’t believe it for a minute. Beyoncé merits a squad-car escort with red-lights flashing. Late is fashionable. Beyoncé is fashionable. She can do better than that excuse. The Grammys honored dozens of music people who passed in the last year, starting with a sweet tribute to Loretta Lynn by Kacey Musgraves, singing her signature, “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” My whole family, watching here and there, pinged its approval and why wouldn’t they? Auntie Loretta invited me to help write her autobiography—and put our three kids through college. Thank you, darlin’. Nearly three hours into it, First Lady Jill Biden came out to present the award for the best song. The announcement seemed to legitimately stun her fellow septuagenarian, Bonnie Raitt, who somehow managed a kind and coherent acceptance speech. I have been a fan of Raitt for decades, particularly for her “Road Tested” double album -- one of the most played albums on my iPod – with heart-touching songs like “Longing in Their Heart” and “I Can’t Make You Love Me” qualifying me as a flat-out Bonnie Raitt groupie. As poleaxed as she seemed, Raitt found the grace to mention John Prine, her friend who died of Covid nearly three years ago, who wrote the song “Angel from Montgomery,” on that same “Road Tested” album. Bonnie Raitt, thanking John Prine. With an hour to go on the Grammys, I clicked off the tube. Quite good enough for me on this long, cold and highly musical weekend. My ode to Thomas McGuane's short story in the New Yorker was followed by these photos from my good friend and master photographer John McDermott, long-time soccer presence, now riding the range (on his bicycle) in northern Italy. John wrote: "One of my favorite assignments ever was to go to Colorado for a German magazine and shoot a story on contemporary cowboys. I had a great time, but ended up with a sore butt and back, not being used to riding a horse up and down steep trails. The deal with the cowboys was, “We'll give you a horse but then you need to help us with the cattle when we need you. So I got to play cowboy a little too." John added: "The shoot took place at a ranch and in the mountains outside of Crested Butte, Colorado. The rodeo was the Cattleman’s Day event held annually in nearby Gunnison. One of the best assignments ever. The Germans were good for that. I did a lot of lengthy photo reportage assignments for Focus-on mega-churches in Texas, on the medical marijuana industry in California, on earthquake preparation in SF, on writer Isabel Allende and many others. They tended to give more space to good photography than most American magazines did. Of course, now most of the American magazines are either greatly diminished, online only, or just gone." Well, cowboys are supposed to be gone, too, but John McDermott's photo essay -- and Thomas McGuane's short story in the New Yorker -- prove that cowboys endure. ![]() GV adds: Several people couldn't open the Thomas McGuane short story, so I took the liberty of downloading it here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/take-half-leave-half Suzyn Waldman speaks Bostonese. Chris Russo speaks Rabid Canine. Congratulations to both icons of the New York ear (and head, and heart) who have just been voted into the Radio Hall of Fame. Their endurance has demonstrated the power of the spoken (or sung) word, for people driving a car or working out or just lazing in a chair. Radio lives. And Suzyn Waldman and Chris Russo have endured for decades, from their early days on WFAN. Waldman is the radio compañera of John Sterling, the long-time play-by-play mainstay of Yankee games. Sterling, bless his heart, provides shtick and nicknames and operatic exaggeration to back up his long career of calling games. Suzyn Waldman (from Newton, Mass., and Simmons College; but you could hear that) had an earlier career in musicals – most notably playing Dulcinea in “Man of La Mancha.” Then she gravitated to talking about sports and was hired by WFAN. Was she a novelty act? She blew up that stereotype by doing what the best reporters do, on any beat. She hung out. She asked questions. And she won the respect of players, managers, coaches and the informed beat writers. From her time in the clubhouse, she knew what player was favoring a sore leg, or was in the doghouse, or had a weakness for a slider. The listener came to rely on her commentary, always politely but authoritatively following Sterling’s calls. Plus, she can follow the fickle bounces in distant corners of a stadium. Yankee fans soon realized: Suzyn Waldman knows her stuff. Not only that, but Waldman became such a moral force that she brokered a reunion between George Steinbrenner and Yogi Berra, who rightfully harbored a grudge against The Boss for having fired him. Blessed are the peacemakers, like Suzyn Waldman. Christopher Russo materialized as a sports reporter on the radio spectacle called “Imus in the Morning” – dominated by the equally brilliant and vicious Don Imus. Your ear could not miss Russo’s babbling patter that resembled Daffy Duck in the cartoons. When the station morphed into all-sports WFAN, he was paired with the opinionated Mike Francesa. (Imus called Francesa and Russo “Fatso and Froot Loops.”) In 1991, I wrote a column about Russo in which I unearthed his secret life: his mom came from England and was reportedly horrified by his diction; he had attended colleges in three different countries – England, Australia and the U.S., and before that he had attended a private school in New York State. Away from the live microphone, I detected a pleasant, centered, educated and ambitious kid who had taken speech therapy and did not mind admitting it. My headline (columnists got to write their own headlines in those days) was: “Mad Dog Is a Preppie.” He and Francesa were wired, babbling about game strategies the night before or pending trades or players who had popped off; I will admit there were times when I needed to see if the odd couple could flush out an owner or a commissioner or an agent. Nobody wanted to be hectored by Mike and the Mad Dog. It was compelling radio, in its way, as long as they lasted together. These days Russo is on Sirius. Sorry, a lot of new things like Sirius and podcasts are outer space to me. I’m a child of radio. I can still remember Edward R. Murrow scaring the hell out of me with his war dispatches from London when I was 4 and 5, and when we managed to survive that war, I found Arthur Godfrey’s jovial variety shows and Red Barber’s erudite calls of the sainted Brooklyn Dodgers. I discovered music on the radio – from Crosby and Sinatra to Aretha and Bob Marley and The Band and Dolly Parton, disk jockeys from the long-ago Jack Lacy on WINS-AM to William B. Williams on WNEW-AM (until I heard him destroying a vinyl record, live, on the air, by some new shaggy-haired kids from Liverpool.) Radio: Garrison Keillor, NPR, Jonathan Schwartz and Peter Fornatale on WNEW-FM, the doomed classical station WNCN, and nowadays an upgraded WQXR-FM particularly Terrance McKnight from Morehouse, 7-11 PM weeknights, the eclectic John Schaefer on WNYC and the great interviewer Brian Lehrer, WNYC, both AM and FM. Baseball? It was invented for the radio, or vice versa, never more than when the grubby forces of Major League Baseball condemn Mets or Yankee games to other networks. Radio is a vibrant medium, all on its own – and Suzyn Waldman and Chris Russo are deservedly in the Radio Hall of Fame. A 300-pound man is gliding down the river in a canoe. His appearance, his shabby belongings stuffed into every corner, are straight from the last thousand homeless people you saw, under the bridge, on the subway bench. But Dick Conant did it differently. He had the intellect and knowledge of the med-school applicant he once had been. He could paint. He carried hard-covered books in his canoe, and some days he just lazed by the river and read. He also could read the river, could decipher the maps, could extract knowledge from other riverman (and more than a few riverwomen) he met on his missions along the Intracoastal. People on the banks, people seeing him lug his jumbled belongings through the streets, stopped to talk to him, were stunned by his intellect, by his knowledge, and also by his tales of a girlfriend named Tracy waiting for him back there somewhere. People never forgot him. America – free-falling into cruel anarchy these days – is built upon wanderers. It’s in our blood. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Jim. Daniel Boone and family making their way through the Cumberland Gap in 1769 as if it belonged to them instead of the natives. Lewis and Clark, ditto, toward the Northwest. John Ledyard’s canoe trip down the Connecticut River from New Hampshire – in 1773. The guy hitch-hiking on Route 66, singing to himself, a regular Chuck Berry. Dick Conant struck a chord. Sometimes the people on the riverbank, meeting this strange hulk, ingesting hot sauce the way other people suck on a Tic-Tac, grew quiet, as if confronting some inner wanderer. Hmmm, they thought. Hmmm. That’s what Ben McGrath, a writer for the New Yorker, thought a few yards from his home on the Hudson River, where the Dutch once encountered the Lenape. McGrath was fully nested, job, wife, growing family, but he was fascinated by this articulate and charismatic giant who secured his canoe near McGrath’s backyard. Hmmm. In the interests of journalistic/literary curiosity, McGrath chatted him up, and vice versa. And when the big man pushed off, McGrath went with him, in a way. Dick Conant was canoeing downriver for perhaps the last big jaunt of his wandering days, and McGrath tried to stay in touch. Then one day on a bad stretch of North Carolina river, the canoe turned up, but not the man. An authority found McGrath's name scribbled on a river map and called him, and McGrath wrote a haunting piece for the New Yorker. He was now into it, big-time, collecting every name and phone number and e-mail address Conant had scribbled somewhere. The only name and address missing was that of Tracy, the lost love Conant always said was waiting for him back in Montana, or somewhere. Now, McGrath has written a touching book entitled “Riverman: An American Odyssey,” recently published by Alfred A. Knopf, including photos of Conant, and photos of a few of his paintings. How did a college soccer player (Albany State) come to be most at home on rivers? McGrath writes about the large and complicated Conant family (he likes every Conant he meets) and all have their version of what happened to kid brother Dicky: too many drugs, too much booze, the late 60’s. (The book is worth it for the meeting at Woodstock between Dick Conant and Jimi Hendrix.) There is a one-sentence allusion to the young boy's quick exodus from a church summer camp: inexplicably, McGrath lets it sit there for many chapters before another quick allusion or two as to why Dicky left that camp, and never seemed the same. That human mystery aside, “Rivertown” is a touching ode to all river towns, most of them falling apart, a century past their prime, but inhabited by people still in touch with the water rushing past. I’ve known rivers (see below): Hannibal, Mo., two visits in the late ‘50s: Louisville, Ky., when my young family rode our bikes alongside the Ohio; as a news reporter, accompanying ecologists on a canoe glide on the Youghiogheny, a tributary of the Monongahela; Uncle Harold Grundy’s cottage in Bath, Maine, a few steps from the Kennebec he had dredged before WW II -- I never appreciated river towns as much as I do now, via the mobile Conant. McGrath solves no mysteries. He writes that Conant either sighted or imagined Tracy, a latter-day Dulcinea, an American Beatrice. Conant drank and danced gracefully in river-town bars, telling people how he was soon going soon to be with Tracy; women were charmed by his eloquent faithfulness; but he never got back. (Unless he’s there now.) ("Cathy, I'm lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping ("I'm empty and aching and I don't know why." --- "America," Paul Simon.) McGrath writes the book half expecting Conant to ring him from some river town and fill him in on the empty canoe, about his recent adventures. The alternative is to slip onto the river in a suitable craft, just to see what’s out there. *** From the classic poem by Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," Gary Bartz has recorded his version: “I’ve Known Rivers.” ![]() I. The iPod. I read the news the other day, oh, boy. Apple is discontinuing the legendary iPod – probably because the company created such a useful, durable machine that it is no longer profitable. The iPod made it possible to store up 1,000 individual songs in a “pocket-size rectangle with a white face and polished steel frame weighed 6.5 ounces,” as the NYT wrote – with the operator able to file them in categories or playlists -- every person a DJ. I will never forget when my kids gave me one, more than 20 years ago, and gave me some lessons until I got the knack of downloading from an Apple computer -- entire CDs. I still remember New York’s valuable and eclectic John Schaefer on FM radio, playing an entire CD, “Casa,” songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim, played by pianist and arranger Ryuichi Sakamoto, cellist Jacques Morelenbaum and singer Paula Morelenbaum, three talents uniting in Portuguese and English. I had it downloaded within days. My “collection” ranges from Yo-Yo Ma’s vibrant “Silk Road Journey” to the gentle classical trio of “Butterworth, Parry, Bridge,” from the signature opener music from “The Sopranos” to Nina Simone singing “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” I have not added to the collection in a decade for two reasons – (a) I am totally out of current music, to (b) I don’t have much access to the Apple laptop that could catalogue an entire CD in a few minutes. Best discovery: I was never a fan of the “Bee Gees” until I discovered that my go-to album for a brisk two-mile walk on the soft track at the high school is the soundtrack from “Saturday Night Fever” – an old guy thinking he’s John Travolta strutting under the El in Brooklyn or in the Saturday night disco. The article in the NYT about the end of the iPod did not mention repairs/upgrades. I don’t trust companies so I will have to be gentle with the iPod…and all those songs. II. Vinyl Lives! The other day WQXR played the classic version of “Peter and the Wolf” with kindly old Uncle Lennie (Bernstein, that is) narrating the Prokofiev score. My wife said, we used to have a “record” of it…50 years ago or so. I riffled around in my closet and found a couple of cardboard boxes filled with old records, including “Peter and the Wolf,” and put it on the Fisher turntable (circa 1975 – with Amazon still supplying a needle every decade or two. My exploration of the Vinyl hoard led to two records that dated me back to the summer of 1982, the Barcelona regional of the World Cup. My journalist friend Alex Martinez Roig invited me out to dinner in a suburb of Barcelona – and introduced me to the music of Joan Manuel Serrat – a baritone philosopher/critic – and later Alex gave me an album. That same week, I was alone on my birthday, and there were no games, so I bought a ticket to an open-air concert in a Barcelona park, by Maria del Mar Bonet, a Majorcan folk singer. She and her band gave a great show, and on the way out I asked a couple to recommend their favorite album of hers, and the next day I dropped into El Corte Inglés and bought it and schlepped it home in my luggage. Since rummaging through my vinyl, I have played these two thoughtful Catalan artists, and through the magic of a Fisher turntable, I feel it is summer in Barcelona, and I am turning 43. *** But in fact, it is 2022, and Serrat’s brief against the madness is as current as, well, of course, Russia invading Ukraine. (English translation here:) https://lyricstranslate.com/en/quien-corresponda-who-corresponds.html III. Memories of Kate and Anna. The Thursday Times informed me that Martha Wainwright has written a memoir. Good grief, is she really 46? But the part that really got me was the NYT’s casual mention that Martha’s mother, Kate McGarrigle, “made 10 albums as part of a duo with her sister Anna before her death in 2010.” Sacré bleu. That’s like saying the New York Knicks had a pretty decent team back in the early 1970s with people you might have heard of, named Frazier and Reed and Bradley and DeBusschere. I’m sorry, but Anna and Kate McGarrigle (and sometimes their more homebound sister Jane) were “The McGarrigles,” a haunting sassy mixture of Irish and Quebecoise – who wrote bilingual songs about love and sex and politics and long sisterly walks in the snow. My point about this talented tribe: beyond the talent of Kate’s former husband, Loudon Wainwright III, their son Rufus Wainwright, and their daughter Martha Wainwright (and never, ever, forget their talented Brooklyn-born band member, and philosophy professor, Chaim Tannenbaum) there were “The McGarrigles,” mostly Anna and Kate. The Times article by Emily Gould makes Anna and Kate sound like footnotes to the present, but they were wonderful, and many, many thousands of us still miss them, badly. * * * I could recommend dozens of their songs, but for these purposes, I go with Kate pounding the piano and singing her dear heart out on “Stella By Artois," (ignore the youtube mis-spelling) about a love affair that lasted just about as long as their band’s trip “from France clear through to Galway.” I dare you not to shed a tear. North Americans have come a long way with Brazil and music. When I was a kid, we had the movie,“The Road to Rio” with Crosby and Hope -- don’t bother – but in the early 1960s I first heard “Song of the Jet,” (Samba do Avião) a Tom Jobim song, sung by Tony Bennett, about a jet landing in Rio. Now we were getting somewhere. In the same magnificent decade for music, we heard a version of “The Girl From Ipanema,” music by Antônio Carlos Jobim, in a collaboration by Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, and In the same decade, we got the bossa nova – Brazil ’66 – Sergio Mendes. About the same time, a skinny kid from Bahia captivated listeners and ticked off the authorities and lived to smirk about it. I’ve been listening to Veloso for over a decade, partially because of my friends Altenir and Celia, but also for the music that flows so copiously, a veritable Amazon of Veloso -- love songs, political songs, tributes to indigenous people, their cultures disrupted by invaders from Europe. On one of his CDs, there is a song called “Manhata,” in his reedy but purposeful voice, about “uma canoa,” as he describes a Lenape maiden piloting her canoe on one of the streams criss-crossing a certain island in North America. (The streams still exist in the basements of high-rise Manhattan. Surprise!) About three minutes in, the peaceful gliding turns into a cacophonous stroll through modern “Manhata” – Blare of horns! Rattle of drums! That would make sense, since Veloso has often performed in the city and seems to find a higher level of ego and motivation in Bigtown. In 2008, Veloso was the subject of a DVD, “Coração Vagabundo" (Wandering Heart) during his tour of Sao Paulo, Japan and Manhata – preening when pretty girls smiled on the street and cabbies honked their horns in recognition. His kind of town. (Blitzer informs us that Veloso keeps a flat in the East Village.) As a writer and a fan, I am envious of the access Blitzer had with Veloso in Rio, and also with musicians I admire like David Byrne and Jacques Morelenbaum. Also, Blitzer’s article quivers with the presence of Tom Jobim, Joao Gilberto, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil. The article also takes us from the dictatorship that spared Veloso in the ‘60s to the current regime of Jair Bolsonaro, who considers it a good day when bulldozers take down dozens of acres of the rain forest. But enough from me. Jonathan Blitzer writes the story so well. Perhaps you subscribe to the New Yorker, as I do, or perhaps you can call up a freebie from the website. Here is the link, and good luck: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/14/how-caetano-veloso-revolutionized-brazils-sound-and-spirit Did I mention that Veloso also sings Cole Porter....and Michael Jackson (above) with a touch of Lennon/McCartney at the end ?
Also, for a great swath of contemporary Brazilian music, my friend Andrea Dunn plays two hours every Monday, from 1-3 PM, Eastern Time, on KDHX (88.1 FM) St. Louis https://kdhx.org/ Tom T Hall passed on Friday, He was a country songwriter who informed my work, telling stories about people. He observed every-day life, regular people, and made them real, with a large dollop of insight and sympathy and wit. I read the lovely obituary in the Sunday NYT by Bill Friskics-Warren and I tried to remember when I first heard Tom T Hall. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/arts/music/tom-t-hall-country-musics-storyteller-is-dead-at-85.html I think it was after I had been one of the first reporters on the scene for the terrible mine explosion in Hyden, Ky., on Dec. 30, 1970. I came back many times, met a lot of survivors – “the widders,” as they say. Turned out, Tom T. Hall was there soon after. He and a buddy drove a pickup from his home in Olive Hill, Ky., not far from the coal region, and he observed with a storyteller’s eye, including the sheriff and the undertaker whom I had met. Maybe he had read my stories, maybe not. Didn’t matter. He put it to music, got it perfect. (The “pretty lady from the Grand Ole Opry” is Loretta Lynn, who had come off the road to play a charity concert in Louisville in 1971, for the survivors. That’s how I got to know Loretta, and later helped her write her book, “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”) In the next years, I collected cassettes of Tom T Hall’s best albums and songs and would play them as I drove around Appalachia. . Some of his best songs were about lost or unrequited love: “Tulsa Telephone Book” -- Readin' that Tulsa telephone book, can drive a guy insane Especially if that girl you're lookin' for has no last name. “The Little Lady Preacher” -- (A picker remembers the gospel singer he backed up every Sunday morning: “She’d punctuate the prophecies with movements of her hips.”) We never met, but I took my young family to see him in New York in the mid-70s. I learned that he had settled in the lush outskirts of Nashville with his wife, Miss Dixie, herself a fixture in Music City, who passed a few years back. I owe Tom T Hall a great debt because he helped me recognize the best parts of people, as flawed as we all are. Only he put it to music and he sang it. In honor of Tom T Hall – a requiem for the older friend who taught him to pick, and other stuff. What is still there, within silent, impassive elders? How can they be reached, revived, made happier? This video suggests something more can be done, with mind, with balance. It comes from Australia, from the ABC Science outlet, and it shows elders, people suffering from Parkinson’s disease and other debilitating conditions, responding to the universal blessing – music – and its partner, dance. * * * At this point, you might prefer to just watch. * * * But let me add this: I was hooked in the first few minutes because the video reminds me of my mother’s last months in the very nice Chapin Home in Jamaica, Queens. She had suffered a stroke plus other indignities of old age, and she rarely spoke. Sometimes my wife would pop in with CDs of operas we knew my mother loved -- “La Boheme” or “Madame Butterfly”-- and my mother would smile with recognition. She did not burst into song or try to dance to “Musetta’s Waltz” but she surely perked up. A few times she even spoke my wife’s name. Some of the other residents would migrate to the room, and listen to the music, which brought smiles and nods and humming memories of the past. In this video, the Australian network delves into the science and the mysteries of the impact of music, but there is so much more to be learned. My wife, who knows more than I do about the science of the brain, asks if, by watching these transformations, couldn’t therapists use the power of music, the muscle memory of youth, to enable daily physical and mental action? * * * I can tell you this: my kids and grandkids could dig up the music that stirs me, right from my vintage iPod with the click wheel. * * My thanks to Bruce-from-Canada, for calling my attention to the Australian science video. There are people out there, breathing a killer virus at you. There is also a ton of snow on the ground where I live. My suggestion: try tuning out the Lame-Duck Orange Sicko for a day. I did it over the weekend. Good Stuff on everywhere. . I started with a link from a friend known as The Cork Lady. (Ireland, that is.) She and her husband sent me a link to a concert via the shut-down Metropolitan Opera -- Bryn Terfel with a holiday concert from his native Wales. What a wonderful surprise: the concert (with no audience) was in the Brecon Cathedral – a place we know and love, in the highlands above Cardiff, The vivid stained-glass brought back memories of a beautiful summer evening, still light outside, our friend and host Alastair (like all Welsh men) singing in a chorus. While Terfel and a talented cast took turns, my mind drifted to Brecon in long-ago summers --sheep being marshalled by border collies, the jolly sound of tourists on canal boats from the nearby Usk River, trips to upscale pubs along the canal, and Alastair going to Brecon market to buy lava bread (pungent, allegedly edible seaweed from the coast.) Not exactly Christmas memories, but lovely memories nonetheless. At 5 PM, another link – this one via the Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Stephen Dunn, my friend from his days as a zone-busting shooter for Hofstra College. No. 20 was known as Radar on a 23-1 team. Radar writes as he shot – smoothly -- his latest book, Pagan Virtues, just out. Stephen’s poetic aim is still perfect but his voice does not permit him to read his own work these days. In a weekly web poetry reading, called LitBalm, some of his new work was read, and read well, by his friend Indran, while Stephen listened in one of the squares on the laptop grid. Keep lofting these jumpers, man. ![]() At 9 PM, we turned on the local PBS station, Channel 13, with its Saturday-night feature -- a classic, or classy, movie (sometimes, inexplicably, displaced by drippy oldie concerts). But not Saturday. Mercifully, there was the Trevor Nunn movie version of “Twelfth Night,” from 1996, Shakespeare’s gender-bender comedy, with a cinematic shipwreck and looming Cornwall hills and castles and Helen Bonham Carter falling in love with a saucy emissary with a highly dubious mustache draped across her kissable upper lip. The cast, as in any English rendition of Shakespeare, was marvelous, but let me praise two: Nigel Hathaway as Malvolio, the resident mansion bully, and Ben Kingsley, for goodness’ sakes, as an omnipresent troubadour (with a really nice voice, his own; it turns out that Kingsley was once urged to pursue singing by his pal, John Lennon.) (We recently saw a stage version of Twelfth Night via the marvelous National Theatre's at-home series, prompted by the pandemic. In that version, Malvolio is female, played by Tamsin Greig, and her comeuppance seems more cruel than Hawthorne’s.) During the final scene Saturday night, when everybody finally figured everything out, I had tears in my eyes. Good Shakespeare does that to me. The antidote for tears came nine – count ‘em, nine – minutes later, on “Saturday Night Live,” the last new one for a month apparently. The host was Kristen Wiig, one of the all-timers, visiting her old haunts. Her opening bit was singing the wintry standard “My Favorite Things,” and when she botched the lyrics, she was joined by another all-timer, Maya Rudolph, who also botched the lyrics, and was in turn joined by the current all-timer Kate McKinnon. Regarding McKinnon: I am watching SNL more in my “retirement” than I ever did, and am totally enthralled with McKinnon In the all-time web ratings of SNL females, I propose St. Gilda as first, and Tina Fey as second (those laser eyes, looking right at you), and McKinnon now ranks third, with me. I love her versions of Rudy and Dr. Fauci and that fuzzy little attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and McKinnon also aces some dark-side female roles, throwing off heat in all directions. How Shakespearean. ![]() That brings us to Sunday. The far-flung family of Anna and the late Kate McGarrigle is staging a virtual reunion, Sunday, all over the world, apparently. It will be streaming (at a price) and available for two weeks, starting at 3 PM. The cast includes longtime backup Chaim Tannenbaum, third-sister Jane McGarrigle, and other staples of that wonderful time. I will catch it, and think of Kate. * * * Also, Nick and Teresa Troiano Masi (Terry and I worked on the paper at Jamaica High) have a grown daughter, Terri Dierkes, who is a cantor in a church in Connecticut, and a leading member of a lovely Christmas concert, which aired Sunday. Details at: https://www.musae.me/terridierkes/experiences/876/an-enchanted Finally, ongoing, for a season of great plays in our homes, the National Theatre is showing 12 filmed plays, for quite modest fees. We've seen about half in recent years. Wonderful stuff. https://www.ntathome.com/products?webSyncID=15a5de53-1723-d49e-1058-0eb4b6cd67b0&sessionGUID=2739e281-ec60-d680-c4d7-0b68a7328c91 * * * There’s a pandemic out there. Nasty weather all over. Stay safe til the vaccines get here. You can't watch The Dangerous Fool every second. Ride it out. Stay safe. Happy Holidays to all. Bad enough that epic ballplayers are passing. Now it’s Toots. Our oldest, Laura, caught him two summers ago in Albany, the gateway to Almost Heaven, Adirondacks. “Bucket list item for me,” Laura typed Sunday from Upstate, when we heard about the passing of Toots Hibbert, age 77, the lead singer of Toots and the Maytals, classic reggae group, which was around for, oh, forever. I remember when I became aware of Toots. I was a regular listener on WNEW-FM, since it became the great pioneer rock station in 1967. For years, Dave Herman had the morning drive-time show that ended at 10 AM. One morning he said he would have, live in the studio, the great Toots Hibbert. And kept telling us, as the final hour ticked away. Finally, about 9:50 or so, Toots arrived in the studio. Only thing was, his mind and his voice had not yet arrived. Brother Dave tried to engage him on why he was in New York, where he was playing, plug his latest album, etc. etc., but Toots emitted only monosyllables. About 9:58, Toots started talking…and talking….a deep-throated but lilting monologue, right up to the signoff music the universal signal that the station is about to move on to news weather, the next host. Ultimately, click, the engineer cut Toots off, mid-sentence. “I think I like this guy,” I said, and I went out and found his cassette (yes, it was that far back), “Funky Kingston,” with songs like “Pressure Drop” and ”Time Tough,” plus the adaptation of John Denver’s song, “Country Roads,” but in the Maytals’ version it becomes “Almost Heaven, West Jamaica.” I loved it, just as much as I love the ruined mountains of Appalachia, and I loved Toots from afar. Never saw him, but the cassette endured. Laura says she has replaced her copy two or three times. Toots had a sound – I’ll let the pop music critics explain. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/arts/music/toots-hibbert-dead.html He wasn’t Bob Marley, whom I regard as musical divinity, but Toots’ earthly voice and rhythm told of joy and pain, good times and bad times. And made you want to move. I never caught him live and never will, but Laura and Diane drove down to the Capitol Region in August of 2018 to catch Toots. “Toots. Free concert. Diverse Albany crowd. Weather,” Laura messaged on Sunday morning as we commiserated. ![]() Laura wrote: The band had driven all the way from California and barely got there on time. The band played Toots in for a good 5-10 minutes before he finally walked on from the back. Then. It was ON. He was older and somewhat stiff but still totally commanding and powerful and totally adept at working the crowd. I typed, “Got any photos?” and the cellphone quivered and hummed and buzzed. She added: "One of the great nights out. Ever." (The following ode to Iowa was written before all hell broke loose in the ramshackle "system" that was supposed to collate the Democratic caucus results Monday night. Even before the network failed to produce while the world was watching, visiting savants like Chris Matthews were questioning -- in front of the earnest citizens -- why Iowa got to hold the highly visible first "primary" scrimmage every four years. With these reasonable questions being raised, Iowa may lose its prominent spot. Shame. There ought to be a place for well-meaning Americana -- but maybe not with an ignorant and vicious wannabe dictator getting a free pass from his party enablers. Poor Iowa, caught up in the tumult. My original praise for Iowa and skepticism about a caucus:) They are highly motivated, conscientious American citizens. But what in the world are they doing? Why don’t they just vote? Then I remember, Iowa is different, or so they say. I’ve been there three times and liked all three visits. (More in a bit.) While trying to make sense of this caucus thing Monday evening, I remembered one of my favorite musicals – “The Music Man,” by Meredith Willson, that’s with two L’s, and don’t you forget it. A con man (Robert Preston) gets off the train in River City, Iowa (Willson was from Mason City) and tries to chat up the townspeople, only to receive a bunch of double talk, some of it polite. The result: “Iowa Stubborn.” That charming character trait emerged Monday in snow-covered Iowa (or “I-oh-way,” as some of the denizens insist.) “The caucus is like cricket,” I told my wife. (We once saw the great West Indies team play a tuneup in a Welsh country town.) “Cricket is easier,” she said, meaning – bat, ball, tea. This caucus thing determines who wins the delegates, who has the momentum, or maybe not. It’s a portrait of Iowa. The Grant Wood painting, American Gothic. I am affectionate about Iowa – after first noting that its populace does not at all resemble that of my home town of New York. My first trip to Iowa was in 1973 when Charlotte Curtis, the great Family/Style editor of the Times (herself a Midwesterner), sent me out to Iowa to write about a boy, 18 or 19, who had just been elected mayor of a little town. (I cannot find the story in the electronic files.) It was such a nice visit, at this cold time of year, as I recall. My second trip to Iowa was early in 1979 when Iowa was selected as one of the sites for the first American visit by Pope John Paul II, because of the huge farm preserve, judged a perfect site for the man from Cracow. After scouting out Des Moines, I had dinner with a couple who had met when he was posted to her town in the Altiplano of a South American country. We went to a Chinese restaurant, where they chatted with the staff in Spanish – a big Chinese contingent, emigrated via Latin America. My third trip to Iowa was on a perfect autumn day in 1979 as the square-jawed Pope strode the plains, waving to a bunch of Lutherans. He was young and strong, looking like a former linebacker for the Iowa Hawkeyes. I edged closer to get a look – and got blind-sided by an American Secret Service guy. When the Pope had moved on, I stood on the great plain and congratulated the nun who had facilitated the press visit. She was so happy that the day had turned out so beautifully that I could think of only one thing to do – I hugged the nun. That’s what I think about whenever I remember that day. Oh, one other Iowa impression: Our daughter Laura decided to spend her junior year abroad and chose Iowa City. Every few weeks the phone would ring and a plaintive voice would say: "It's dark out here." ![]() Now, every four years, the great journalists from my cable-network-of-choice wander all over that state and I thrill to every coffee klatsch and every barber shop. The journalists can explain “quid-pro-quo” and “impeachment” perfectly, but they cannot explain what those folks are doing on the first Monday in February. (The aforementioned Laura watched caucus news from Iowa Monday night and texted us: "Nicolle and Rachel far better than Troy and Buck." Poor girl is having Super Bowl flashbacks.) Maybe Meredith Willson could have explained the caucus, but he was more interested in the busy intersection of chicanery and romance, and bless his heart for that. Back in the day, when sports columnists were a daily presence, my job description included having an opinion on the national college football championship. Often, this entailed being in warm places on New Year’s Day, which is the best thing I can say about covering the loopy methods of judging teams with differing schedules playing in different bowl games. Bowl games got me to Pasadena or Miami. What can I say? Now that I am retired, I pay no attention to any form of football. Instead, I am free to follow another highly imperfect ratings system, closer to my heart and ear – the annual vote for the best classical music, as conducted by the invaluable station emanating from my home town (and live on the Web) WQXR-FM, 105.9 on the dial. The station has been conducting this poll since the mid-‘80s, asking listeners to rank their favorites. The results are played in the annual countdown in the last week of the year, generally reflecting the programming of the station – the old favorites, often presented one movement at a time. During the countdown, the station also conducts a running blog (results not updated as quickly as listeners would like) including commentary from the faithful in distant states and foreign lands. Many of respondents are passionate about wanting" More variety! More medieval music! More Reich and Glass! More music by African-American composers! More music by women! Plus, there is the rampant suspicion that some Gilbert & Sullivan supporters pack the ballot box, just like voters in some towns and states I could name. And some listeners question whether Gilbert & Sullivan is actually classical music. I pass on that one. My feeling is, the annual countdown reflects the tastes of people who support WQXR and live classical music in New York. More power to them. Still: every year I make a small list of music I play at home, and I hope some of it will slip into the countdown. As my friend Vic Ziegel, who introduced me to the strange charm of the racetrack, used to say about the track announcer: “At least give my horse a call.” In the past few couple of years, I have been trending toward chamber music at home because it is self-contained, providing a welcome alternative to the toxic earworms on the air waves. --In an ugly time, I have become infatuated with Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” for its beauty and pace and dignity. --I often choose “Butterworth/Parry/Bridge,” its three composers taking me back me to lazy summer days, visiting a friend in the Brecon Beacons of Wales. -- I was rooting hard for something by Florence Price, the composer whose work is often championed by the wonderful Terrance McKnight on his evening gig, not just in Black History Month, either. --Because we are blessed to have two good friends comprising half of the New Zealand String Quartet, we have their works by Bartok, among others. -- But the work I was really hoping for was Sir William Walton’s Violin Concerto, performed by Kyung-Wha Chung. I still remember the first time I heard it: I was a news reporter in the late ‘70s, driving to meet some nuns in jeans and sweatshirts who did the Lord’s work in the South Bronx. But when this stunning piece appeared on my car radio, I sat and listened for the full half hour. Alas, this beautiful piece is not easily found on vinyl or CD – and is not in the WQXR top 120, either. Not even, in racetrack parlance, a call. The 2019 list does include many things I love, including a few pieces by Erik Satie, Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” and – No. 4 in the poll -- Dvorak’s “From the New World.” The older I get, the more I appreciate Dvorak, for his music and also for his love for two worlds, Bohemia and America. I missed it live, but there on the list at No. 68 was a very modern already-classic, "The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace," by Karl Jenkins, first performed in 2000, which I heard for the first time in the past year. However, the piece that really knocked me out was No. 109, Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony No. 8 in E-Flat, Symphony of a Thousand,” by the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting, with wonderful soloists and choruses. It made me stop what I was doing and just listen. At the end, Beethoven placed six in the top 10. I have no quarrel with the selections because the voters care about “their” music. It’s up to us to seek out the music we love, and play it, and pay for it, early and often. Happy New Year. * * * The current results: https://www.wqxr.org/story/wqxr-classical-countdown-2019/ Plus, check out the blog with informed and passionate comments by listeners: . And for comparison, the two most recent results. https://www.wqxr.org/story/wqxr-2018-classical-countdown/ https://www.wqxr.org/story/wqxr-2017-classical-countdown/ The first of December was covered with snow So was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston The Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go ---James Taylor, “Sweet Baby James” Snowing again, this first of December. This typist has little to say on this left-over Sunday. Over the holiday, I’ve been reading “Poems of New York,” selected by Elizabeth Schmidt, while my wife is reading “Underland,” by a philosopher-explorer, Robert MacFarland. Thank goodness for writers. Pete Hamill is writing a book from his home borough of Brooklyn. Pete is among the three great print troubadours of my home town – along with Murray Kempton and Jimmy Breslin. (Dan Barry would make a quartet, when he is in print.) Hamill is not well, as documented by Alex Williams in the Sunday Times, but he is going to get his Brooklyn book done, he says. Also gutting it out is the great film director, Michael Apted, who has just issued his latest documentary – and, he says, his last – in the seven-year cycle about English youths who grew older, the ones who were lucky. I have a great debt to Michael Apted for putting Loretta Lynn’s story on the screen, after I helped her write her book, and Tom Rickman wrote a magnificent film script. I was afraid Hollywood would turn Loretta’s world into a segment of “Beverly Hillbillies,” but as Rickman told me about Hollywood: “Sometimes the good guys win.” I got to thank Apted when the movie had its premiere in Nashville and then in Louisville. Invited along for the chartered bus ride up I-65, I asked Apted how he got the feel for Eastern Kentucky and he talked about his roots in England – not just London – and he said, “I am no stranger to the coal mines.” Good luck with your new movie, sir. Today belongs to talented people like James Taylor and Pete Hamill and Michael Apted. A friend recently gave me a couple of poetry books, one by Seamus Heaney, the other a collection about my home town. I include a segment from Nikki Giovanni, about the sudden flashes of humanity you encounter just about anywhere in the city. This is about a blind woman, uptown. You that Eyetalian poet ain’t you? I know yo voice. I seen you on television I peered closely into her eyes You didn’t see me or you’d know I’m black. Let me feel yo hair if you Black Hold down yo head I did and she did Got something for me, she laughed You felt my hair that’s good luck Good luck is money chile she said Good luck is money. -- From “The New Yorkers” I’ll leave it there. Keep writing, Pete Hamill. I’m waiting on your Brooklyn book. They changed their minds. A week ago, WNYC announced it was terminating its familiar "New Sounds" program with John Schaefer. On Monday, Goli Sheikholeslami, the new president and CEO of New York Public Radio, announced that "New Sounds" and Schaefer and the long-time producer, Caryn Havlik, will be remaining.
In a gracious statement, Sheikholeslami said, "A show like New Sounds can only be produced by public radio, and specifically at NYPR." She recently resigned from her arts job in Chicago to take the leadership of New York Public Radio. Sheikholeslami's full statement on line can be read here: https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/reversal-wnyc-says-new-sounds-will-stay-airwaves The moral to the story is that sometimes new executives need to be reminded just what it is they are leading. Protesting is good, particularly in something as subjective as the arts. Donating (or not donating) also works. I am so happy for John Schaefer -- and for the eclectic audience of WNYC in the city that never sleeps. Here is my original article last week: I can’t remember where I was, but I definitely had the radio on, late one evening, listening to John Schaefer’s show, “New Sounds.” You never know what you will get. Schaefer seemed to find music from cultures all over the world, and within the United States – odd instruments, string and reed and percussion, plus the human voice at all pitches, and he would bubble about them, with junior-high-school enthusiasm. This night – he works best late in the evening – Schaefer introduced a trio performing the songs of Antonio Carlos Jobim but with unique arrangements, a blend of classic and bossa nova, familiar songs, carefully crafted. The album was “Casa,” performed by Ryuichi Sakamoto with his incisive, spare piano, and Jacques Morelenbaum, with his lush, sweeping cello, and vocalist Paula Morelenbaum, with her haunting Portuguese and charming almost lisping English. The songs were standards, from the basic Jobim playbook, but the interpretations were unique. I think Schaefer informed us that the album was recorded on the piano of the late Tom Jobim – in Jobim’s lakeside house in Rio. From what I read, Sakamoto felt awe at his pilgrimage to the home of the master, and had to ease into touching the piano. I was hooked, went out and bought the CD, which has become the most-played album on my iPod. A classic. That’s what John Schaefer does. He finds new releases, some of them flirting with commercial, some of them delightfully obscure, destined for one-time hearing, but in the memory bank, somewhere. A show like this would seem to have institutional permanence, particularly in polyglot multicultural New York. In fact, “New Sounds” lasted from 1982 until this week, when the new hatchet at WNYC announced that “New Sounds” is about to be disappeared. For what reason? They have a better replacement? “Why would they do that?” Laurie Anderson asked Michael Cooper in the Times on Monday. In the city that never sleeps, shouldn’t there remain a place for music you never heard before? Something that opens your mind and your ears? “New Sounds?” What does the “NY” in WNYC stand for? Thank you, John Schaefer, for the many years of “New Sounds” and please let your fans know about the next gig. * * * Bad news on the doorstep: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/arts/music/wnyc-new-sounds-schaefer.html?searchResultPosition=1 A review of "Casa" when it was new: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-aug-30-et-jazz30-story.html Johnny Cash and June Carter were making out on stage.
They were preparing for an awards show in Nashville, enduring the long waits that are part of any rehearsal. What better way to pass the time? This was in the mid-‘70s, and they were already an old married couple, but they seemed like teen-agers falling in love. My wife happened to catch the eye of Ann Murray, the great Canadian singer, who was sitting nearby in an empty row. They both raised their eyebrows – but affectionately -- as if to say, “Get a room.” I was thinking of this Sunday night during the latest episode of “Country Music,” the ongoing series from Ken Burns. The documentary may be a bit pat about racial and class divides and too formulaic about the terrible stresses of the ‘60s, but Burns has captured some of the personal statements of hope and change. Sunday’s two hours focused on the mid-‘60s, as a time of change, not only in country music but at lunch counters and marches in the South and campuses and towns all over America. Country music’s changes included Loretta Lynn’s song “The Pill,” banned for a while by some chicken radio stations, and Charlie Pride’s acceptance as a black star who sounded white. The series says that Loretta was the presenter for the top male award in country music, and was told to keep her distance if Pride were the winner. However, when they met on stage, she moved forward and gave him a hug and a kiss. Part Cherokee, Loretta was not going to let people tell her what to do in matters of race and color (or anything.) In her book, Loretta says it happened in 1972 when she won the Entertainer of the Year Award. “People warned me not to kiss Charley in case I won, because it would hurt my popularity with country fans. I heard that one girl singer got canceled out Down South after giving a little peck to a black friend on television. Well, Charley Pride is one of my favorite people in country music, and I got so mad that when I won I made sure I gave him a big old hug and a kiss right on camera. You know what? Nobody canceled on me. If they had, fine. I’d have gone home to my babies and canned some string beans and the heck with them all.” – “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” by Loretta Lynn, with George Vecsey. Other examples of ‘60s change were Dolly Parton, with her songs and her brains and her looks, willing herself up from East Tennessee poverty, and Merle Haggard, with his Warren Beatty looks and Bakersfield twang, overcoming his time in prison. The most compelling figure in Sunday’s episode was Johnny Cash, with his childhood of deprivation from money and love, discovering his talent, and his feel for injustice. In the’60s, while males in Nashville were wearing Nudie’s of Hollywood peacock outfits, Cash wore only black, to show support for the underdogs, but the color was also an expression of his moods. The series shows Cash blowing up his marriage for his passion for June Carter, but also getting deep into drugs. One live sequence shows him fidgeting at a recording session, twisting and turning, grimacing, removing his shoes, just out of his mind. In one live performance, Mother Maybelle Carter, singing backup, watches him warily, knowing that at any moment she and her daughters might have to scrape him up off the floor. That segment ought to be an advertisement for just about any human on legal alcohol or illegal ”recreational” or or the pain-killers doctors and big pharma push on people. Cash was zonked. Burns did not cite the song that Nick Lowe, Cash’s son-in-law at the time, wrote about Cash, who fine-tuned it into a standard: “The Beast in Me.” ….the beast in me That everybody knows They've seen him out dressed in my clothes Patently unclear If it's New York or New Year God help the beast in me… When I was working on Barbara Mandrell’s book, she told how as a precocious teen-ager she traveled with the Cash entourage, and was treated respectfully, but she also recalled Cash in a diner, nervously picking the stuffing out of a Naugahyde booth, just a bundle of nerves. The Sunday episode stressed personal revival, finishing in Folsom Prison, where Cash recorded his epic album, cracking jokes that the inmates got. He never had a better audience. There is a touching moment at the end where he performs a song written by one of the prisoners, and shakes his hand. I will vouch for the feeling Cash gave of a transformed – saved -- man, after he sought help for his addictions. In 1973, I interviewed him and June Carter in New York, upon the opening of a movie they had made about the life and death of Christ. He was calm, reflective, and they were deeply in love. Johnny Cash still wore black. Having met him a few times, I am sure he would be wearing it today. **** The back story to “The Beast in Me:” https://americansongwriter.com/2018/08/nick-lowe-the-beast-in-me/ *** My other memory of that rehearsal at the new theme park in the mid-‘70s, after the Opry had deserted its spiritual home, the Ryman Auditorium: Mooney Lynn (Loretta’s husband and my pal) and Roy Clark, the sweet-voiced troubadour, partaking of the upscale snacks, praising the hot and flaky hors d'oeuvre, which they lustily praised as “egg pie.” Quiche, that is. (They knew that. This is why I love country.) Just in case you missed it, there is a marvelous series on PBS this week called “Country Music.”
I watched the first two-hour installment Sunday night instead of the Mets and Dodgers, which says a lot. (Okay, I peeked at the score periodically on my cellphone.) The educator Jacques Barzun is remembered for writing, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball….” I would add country music to that observation. It has been there, the rhythms and words of the complicated American heart – particularly by the expanded definition and parameters submitted by Ken Burns, the producer of the 16-hour series. “Country Music” is lavishly arranged for the next full week on PBS (two hours, repeated the next two hours, at least on New York’s Channel 13.) Burns and Dayton Duncan, the writer, have expanded the definition of country music way beyond the sequins-and-overalls very-white image to a more inclusive version that pays homage to black/gospel/race/soul music. Burns and Duncan consciously blur the lines, showing copious footage of black churches, black performers and black fans, sometimes mingling with whites far more openly than I would have imagined. My time as Appalachian correspondent for the Times, later helping Loretta Lynn and Barbara Mandrell write their books, gave me marvelous access from the wings of the Grand Ol’ Opry and on the buses and concerts and other good stuff. I did not see much of a black audience, but Burns and Duncan have the footage and sound tracks to include blacks – plus, Elvis Presley, bless his dead heart, always acknowledged his overt inspirations from southern soul music. But country music is, ultimately, built on the strains and the sentiments straight from the British Isles (and the complicated heritages there.) I have always maintained that when the brilliant Dolly Parton opens her sensual mouth and lets the thoughts and the music flow, she is in touch with hardy people who emerged from the hills of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, who had the courage to get on a boat and sail across the ocean – often to escape back into the hills of that new world. Dolly, for all her glitz, is a medium. The women – Kathy Mattea, Dolly Parton, Rosanne Cash and Rhiannon Giddens, lead singer of the old-timey Carolina Chocolate Drops – carry the first segment. The series opens with Mattea (you should know her work) describing her arrival in Nashville from West Virginia, at 17, too young to perform, but able to work as a guide in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Lovingly, she points at the Thomas Hart Benton painting, “The Sources of Country Music,” as compelling the best museum docent you ever heard. The first segment, and I can only assume the entire series, has the same high level. This is serious stuff about America, about us. What did I learn? I had no idea Jimmie Rodgers, “The Singing Brakeman,” was as widely popular as he was from 1927 to 1933, when he was cut down by equal parts hard living and tuberculosis. I thought he was more of a regional phenomenon. Rodgers lived the music he sang, and sold tons of records (for Joe Biden’s record player, and the old Veep is not alone.) Rodgers made his last record in New York City, propped up by shots of whiskey between takes. There is a poignant photo of Rodgers on a lounge at Coney Island, enjoying the sun, a day or two before he died, at 35. Then came the special train ride home, the old railroad hand heading back to Mississippi. The documentary should have ended with the Iris DeMent version of the Greg Brown song, “The Train Carrying Jimmie Rodgers Home,” with DeMent’s voice a mournful train whistle cutting through the southern night. But that’s just me, an Iris groupie. The first segment includes DeFord Bailey, a black harmonica player, an early staple on the Opry, and Ralph Peer, who turned country music into a lucrative industry, and the Carter family (I got to see Mother Maybelle perform in her later years), plus commentary from Charlie Pride and Wynton Marsalis, as well as Merle Haggard and Mel Tillis, both interviewed before their deaths, in the past few years. The second installment, Monday night, will focus on the Depression, using the Stephen Foster dirge, “Hard Times,” for its title. The Mets will be playing in Colorado, trying to hold on, but I will be watching “Country Music.” That about says it. I learned something very nice today.
We were listening to NPR and heard about a young woman who has chosen innovative treatment for sickle-cell anemia. The hopeful procedure is about to take place in Nashville, America’s new hot destination town, in the Sarah Cannon Research Institute. Sarah Cannon. Long ago, several times, I met a wise and mannered lady of Nashville named Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon. People on the Grand Ole Opry knew her as Minnie Pearl, who bustled onto the stage with a country dress and a straw hat with a price tag always hanging from the brim, and the familiar greeting of, “How-DEEEEEEE!” She was a novelty act – a comedienne, not a singer, not a picker, not a looker in that outfit – but also a mainstay of the Opry. Others came and went but Minnie Pearl and Roy Acuff were almost always there, with a presence that spoke of the establishment. Many of her fans knew she had a degree (a rarity for women, in her youth) from Ward Belmont College (Now Belmont University) and was one of the grand ladies of Nashville. But on Saturday evening they wanted to see and hear her bumpkin persona, lamenting how she could never attract “a feller.” One time I met her was in 1975, at the Nashville premiere of Robert Altman’s movie, “Nashville.” A lot of the in-crowd was bad-mouthing the movie as making fun of the Opry, but a few people seemed to see the vision and art of the movie. Dotty West, redhead and singer, told me, “It's not a put-down. It's a fine picture, and I'm looking forward to seeing it again.” And Mrs. Cannon gave me a tactful quote: “very interesting—maybe I'm too close to Nashville—this is my home, my family—I can't make a judgment now.” I thought she was letting me know that she got it. I knew Mrs. Cannon had passed but did not know the details until today, when I looked up her connection to the hospital. It turns out she had undergone a double mastectomy in the mid ‘80’s, and had a stroke in 1991, and died in a nursing home in 1996, at the age of 83. At some point her name was on the hospital, now part of a broader chain of hospitals, most in the border-state region. Now, at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Music City, a young woman seeks relief from a crippling and murderous condition that disproportionately affects African-Americans. Victoria Gray, 34, from Forest, Miss., is at the Sarah Cannon institute, having volunteered for the gene-editing CRISPR technique to treat a genetic disorder. "It's a good time to get healed," Ms. Gray told NPR in an exclusive interview, noting that she cannot move her arms. The interview did not identify Sarah Cannon as the grand old face of the Grand Ole Opry, but I recognized her name. I want to add that I always loved being around the Opry, and that I am delighted, in a very ugly time (and that is all I am saying; you know what I mean), Mrs. Cannon’s life is being used to bring hope to people who suffer from this horrible condition. As Ms. Gray is being treated in Music City, may she hear a word of earthly healing: “How-DEEEEEEE!” NPR article: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/07/29/744826505/sickle-cell-patient-reveals-why-she-is-volunteering-for-landmark-gene-editing-st Sarah Cannon Research Institute: https://sarahcannon.com/about/index.dot Sickle-cell anemia: https://news.nnlm.gov/scr/sickle-cell-anemia-predominant-among-african-americans/ Bio of Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon: https://www.vacationsmadeeasy.com/NashvilleTN/articles/MinniePearlBiography.cfm My article about Nashville’s reception for the Altman movie in 1975 https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/10/archives/nashville-has-mixed-feeling-an-nashville.html?searchResultPosition=1 I was poking around my iPod, listening to downloaded pop songs beginning with “M” – “Manha de Carnival” with Susannah McCorkle, “Manhata” with Caetano Veloso, The Dead’s version of Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried’– and up popped “The Man in Black,” by Johnny Cash.
I was immediately nostalgic for the man, and the mood, his all-black outfits, and the coal-black eyes piercing the soul of the audience. Where are you, man? This became his signature song, performed for the first time at a concert at Vanderbilt University in 1971 – a time of anti-war and pro-civil rights fervor. He addressed some students in the audience, saying that a conversation, few days earlier, had prompted him to write this song, explaining why he wore only black out in public. I want to add that I met Johnny Cash a few times – once backstage at the Opry in the old and beloved Ryman Auditorium, just a bunch of people hanging around, a few feet away from the live performance. He was just one of the people backstage – old Ernest Tubb, young Dolly Parton, vibrant Skeeter Davis, people just hanging and chatting. When he produced a Jesus movie in the mid ‘70s, I interviewed him and June Carter at C.W., Post College where the movie was being showcased. Again, he was the most approachable and democratic star, talking about his faith as a baby Christian, but (a gigantic “but”), not patronizing or dogmatic. They were the nicest couple. My wife and I saw them again at a rehearsal for the country awards at the new (and sterile) Opryland in the early 80s. He and June were smooching during a break in the rehearsals; Anne Murray, sitting nearby, locked eyes with my wife, and they smiled warmly, as if to say, “Get a room.” Johnny Cash and June Carter were in love. Not long afterward, catching a red-eye in California, I saw him coming down an empty corridor, a big man in black, his eyes a zillion miles away. I most definitely did not say hello. Anyway, I think I can say, having been around Johnny Cash a few times, and having listened to his work (his time-growing-short album, “American Songs”), that he had a feel for his country, the poor, the imprisoned, the people trying to get clean, the marginal and the diverse. I think I can say he hated bullies and pretenders. He came from rural Arkansas and he knew cities and campuses, could talk with students at Vanderbilt, could take their questions and make a song out of them. I wish he were writing songs today, in the time of The Man in Orange. * * * (Just in case you are not into Johnny Cash’s voice, here are his lyrics.) Man In Black Johnny Cash Well, you wonder why I always dress in black, Why you never see bright colors on my back, And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone. Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on. I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town, I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, But is there because he's a victim of the times. I wear the black for those who never read, Or listened to the words that Jesus said, About the road to happiness through love and charity, Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me. Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose, In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes, But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back, Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black. I wear it for the sick and lonely old, For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold, I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been, Each week we lose a hundred fine young men. And, I wear it for the thousands who have died, Believen' that the Lord was on their side, I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died, Believen' that we all were on their side. Well, there's things that never will be right I know, And things need changin' everywhere you go, But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things right, You'll never see me wear a suit of white. Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day, And tell the world that everything's OK, But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back, 'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black Songwriters: Johnny Cash Man In Black lyrics © BMG Rights Management In the final hours of an ugly year, I stuck with the tried and true.
Our local classical station, WQXR-FM, was playing the top 100, as chosen by listeners. It was reassuring to hear music that stirred people and soothed people in other dark times, with other crackpots and despots flailing around, and the music survived. Then again, we have seen votes go wacko in a democracy. When the Gilbert and Sullivan spectacle, “Pirates of Penzance,” popped up in 10th place, my reaction was, “Wait, WTF, how did that get in there?” The WQXR–FM web site had the same reaction: Was it was the work of Gilbert and Sullivan superfan sleeper agents? Or is everyone just really excited about the end-of-year New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players production of Pirates at the Kaye Playhouse. (It turns out that it very well might be both, as the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players staged a campaign to launch the opera into the countdown — and it clearly worked. Trolls. Bots. Hacking. Malware. Whatever they are. Sounds like a job for Super-Mueller, but Our Civic Protector is said to be otherwise occupied with his investigation into more serious shenanigans. Other than the jolt of Gilbert and Sullivan coming in 10th in any classical music ranking, it was a joy to hear oldies soothe the dark days and nights as 2018 slunk off into history. Beethoven had four symphonies in the top 10, including his Ninth, with the rousing “Ode to Joy,” now becoming a staple ‘round midnight on Dec. 31. Some of the most familiar music can be considered chestnuts, but I was happy to hear them, knowing that new and adventuresome and inventive music will be presented by John Schaefer on “New Sounds” and by Terrance McKnight on his weeknight show. Plus, as 2018 ebbed, I heard some of my favorites, Dvorak and Copland and Vaughn Williams and Smetana and Bartok and Barber and Ravel and Satie and Lenny Himself, conducting his “West Side Story: Symphonic Dances,” which always makes me feel 16 again, walking the streets of my home town, feeling, “could be, who knows?” In the symphonic version, I could hear the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim: Could it be? Yes, it could Something's coming, something good If I can wait Something's coming, I don't know what it is But it is gonna be great. Happy New Year. Outside, the storms – political and meteorological – were raging. Inside there was a winter concert, by students and, later, enthusiastic alums.
How sweet it was, to find shelter from all storms, to hear young people play and sing, with considerable skill. Our youngest grandchild was in one of the ensembles, but honestly the quality of the music and the spirit of the young people would have been an attraction by itself. This was Thursday evening at Schreiber High School in Port Washington, Long Island, which, as much as it changes, retains its home-town feel, on a peninsula, with a train line terminating there, and a real downtown -- 45 minutes by rail from Penn Station. The superb arts department produced one concert Wednesday and another on Thursday – an orchestra, a band, a choir, and then an ensemble for the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah.” A young woman gave a haunting flute solo; a young man led one section with a strong first violin; a young man played a specialty instrument that evoked the swirling of the sea. I was particularly captivated by the choir, having had the privilege of singing in Mrs. Gollobin’s chorus at Jamaica High School in the mid-‘50’s and admiring the choir members. I watched the faces of these young people as they put their hearts into “Rock of Ages,” and, I will confess, I remembered our chorus harmony from 1954-56, and I softly hummed to myself. I thought of the choir stars from Jamaica High – an alto who taught music at a university in Texas for many decades, and our two lead sopranos who came back for reunions, still beautiful and active well into their 70s. And then there was Eddie Lewin, star soccer halfback and lead in our musicals. (Lotte Lenya came to our performance of her late husband Kurt Weill’s operetta, “Down in the Valley,” with Lewin playing the lead role.) In later years, Eddie took a pause in his medical career to fulfill his dream of touring with “Fiddler on the Roof.” I thought about our choir and chorus while watching the young people of Port Washington as they performed so brilliantly in their own time. At the end, the leaders honored the tradition by calling all alumni of the music department to join them in Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” Dozens of recent graduates filled up the sides of the auditorium. They were asked to call out their graduation classes – 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 – and somebody said, “1976!” That was Jonathan Pickow, a well-known musician from our town, the son of Jean Ritchie, one of the great traditional folk singers and historians from her native Eastern Kentucky. (Ritchie Jean and her husband George Pickow – now both passed – lived high on a hillside in our town. First time I heard Ritchie was at Ballard High in Louisville, when we lived there, around 1971-2. She reassured Kentuckians that the steep hill on glacial Long Island made her feel she was still in Viper, Perry County. Jon has toured with Harry Belafonte, the Norman Luboff Choir and other choirs, has performed with Oscar Brand, Judy Collins, Theo Bikel, Odetta, Josh White, Jr., Tovah Feldsuh and my pal, Christine Lavin. And there he was, amidst musicians more than 40 years younger than him, talking respectfully of having been part of music programs at Schreiber High in Port Washington, back in the day. Music is classical; it provides shelter in all storms. * * * PS: Jean Ritchie wrote the classic protest song, "Black Waters," about strip-mining, which obviously the tone-deaf Mitch McConnell from Louisville has never heard. https://politicaltunes.wordpress.com/2014/01/31/jean-ritchie-black-waters/ https://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/16/arts/weill-s-opera-down-in-the-valley.html http://www.jonpickow.com/bio/ https://www.ket.org/education/resources/mountain-born-jean-ritchie-story/ https://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-cleftones-mn0000073914/biography Monday Morning: My wife asked, “Well, what are you going to do now?” La guerre est finie. Well, I said, family, friends, chores, read a book, get to sleep earlier. The better team won, of course. That is what experts seemed to be saying about the Red Sox weeks ago, and it was obvious throughout. Who doesn’t like redemption? I’ve witnessed two great Dodger pitchers, Don Newcombe and Bob Welch, both of whom I got to know, not win a World Series game, and that is no fun. It wasn’t fun trying to pick between Clayton Kershaw and David Price, two left-handers in search of redemption, but I have never met Kershaw and I did encounter Price during the 2008 post-season when he was a thoughtful kid out of Vanderbilt, coming on for the Rays. So, in a way, I was rooting. His redemption was magnificent, on the tube, Sunday night. So was post-season baseball because it allowed me to purge more of the Mets out of my tormented system. Better baseball. One play exemplifies: In the third desperate game, the Dodgers’ versatile Cody Bellinger, son of a former Yankee, wearing my good friend Bob Welch’s old No. 35, and wearing it well, was in center field, trying to avert what would be a devastating run. Fly ball to medium center field. Bellinger backed up with those long legs of his and took a running start inward toward the descending ball, caught it and heaved it on a fly near home, just in time to cut off a runner trying to score from third. https://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2018/10/27/18031312/world-series-dodgers-cody-bellinger-throw-ian-kinsler-home Just the way the game ought to be taught. But after watching the Mets (except when the brittle Juan Lagares could play center) I forgot how people like Bradley, Jr., and Betts and Bellinger and Hernández and all the rest could play center field. So a dose of much better baseball sends us off to the winter. Early Monday morning, I had time and brain width to read two stirring obituaries, one on the playwright Ntozake Shange and one on the contemplative monk, the Rev. Thomas Keating, both exquisitely written. (My Appalachian pal, Randolph, now occasionally commenting on this little therapy web site, had sent me the link with a comment: “I feel a sadness. He was such a good man. He really understood that religion was secondary and he tried to bridge the gap between Christianity, Buddhism and all religions: we are all humans....” Randy The two obits: what a start to the off-season. And don’t forget to vote next week. EARLIER WORLD SERIES ARTICLES: Date shake -- or Necco wafers? This was the cryptic note from my older daughter, a recovering newspaper columnist, just like her dad. Knowing that she is also a poet (a good one), I knew this was a simile or allegory or symbol, one of those things. I got it. Southern California vs. Boston. The World Series matchup. Sweet tooth and clashing baseball instincts. This was before the first two games in chilly, quivering Fenway Park. On a clean slate, this Met fan pondered the two delicacies -- the sweet, freeze-your-brain specialty of Southern California or the traditional New England circular treat that fits right on your tongue. (The chocolate one!) I flashed upon the great post-season games that Laura Vecsey and I covered. https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/my-favorite-columnist-and-her-baseball-career Laura would place a fresh Necco package on my press-box table -- straight from the New England factory. (The company has since gone down, but an Ohio company seems to have rescued it.) thetakeout.com/necco-wafers-and-sweetheart-candies-saved-from-dusty-ex-1829300533 But then I thought about being a young baseball reporter in the mid-60s, night games in Anaheim, mornings driving out to Laguna Beach, swimming with the seals, (ruining my skin for decades later) and then searching the coastal highway for a utilitarian shack producing that thick substance laced with bits of chewy dates. The Beach Boys on the car radio. A date shake in my hand. No brainer. I vote for date shakes. The World Series is a different flavor altogether. The Mets are a distant horrible memory. I watch the three Boston outfielders and the Dodger center fielders, changing by the inning, all running down shots into the alleys. Good baseball, so rich, so filling, making the masochistic Mets fillings in my teeth ache. I have to choose? Normally, I'd be partial to the team of my childhood, Brooklyn Dodgers, and even in the 80s I was doing a book with Bob Welch and became friendly with Al Campanis and renewed my admiration for Don Newcombe, still with them. But it's a different age. I don't like rent-a-star Manny Machado, even with that magnificent arm and all the other skills. As a guy with a formerly red beard, now trimmed tight, I think Justin Turner's beard is, well, over the top. All I'm saying is, not my team. I have never rooted for the Red Sox (well, maybe when they played the Yankees in the 70s), and I still do not, but I love Fenway Park and I love Boston, deeply love visiting there. And David Price was such a nice young guy in 2008 with Tampa Bay, not long from Vanderbilt, smart, open. I have been happy that he finally won a post-season game and now has won a World Series game. That isn't rooting. It's just appreciation. None of this fits my Mets, need-to-suffer, pathology. Plus, my agent is a fervent Red Sox fan. I always want her to be happy. But in the scenario posted by my older daughter, I would choose a date shake -- Beach Boys on the radio -- coastal highway -- anytime. Enjoy the rest of the series. THEN THERE'S THIS: It took a health walk on Friday with my head-set – listening to one of my all-time top-ten CDs, Ry Cooder’s epic “Chavez Ravine” -- to make me question my knee-jerk feelings about this World Series. The album is a highly pointed look at the “acquisition” of the land for the Dodgers’ home park since 1962. As a Brooklyn fan, I hated the Dodgers’ move (and Walter O’Malley.) But the first time I saw the transplanted Dodgers in their pastel playpen, 1964, on a gorgeous spring evening, I shook my head and thought, “Hmmm.” As a Queens-Brooklyn guy, I could understand, if not forgive. Ry Cooder’s masterpiece talks about the people who lived in the ravine, and the establishment’s “UFO” that warned them to evacuate their homes. He wrote songs about the campesinos who lived there, but also the truck drivers and urban planners and red-scare politicians who were part of it. And after all the disruption, Cooder presents a sweet song about the ghosts who inhabit the ball park: 2nd base, right over there. I see grandma in her rocking chair Watching linens flapping in the breeze, And all the fellows choosing up their teams…. The man parks cars outside the ball park and he concludes, “Yes, I’m a baseball man myself.” I love that album. Play it all the time. (check out the beautiful Costa Rican poem, “Soy Luz y Sombra” at the end.) So my question for the day, after my health walk: is, isn’t that beautiful and enduring place, even with its brutal beginnings, a worthy bookend to Boston and Fenway? Friday Night's Marathon: Yes, I Went the Distance
Well, with a brief excursion to watch Burt Reynolds flirt with a blonde and out-drive Ned Beatty in "White Lightning." It had to be done. These post-season games, with their commercial breaks, make me crave a moonshiner in a car chase. Action. Plus, I find the network broadcast to be hopelessly saccharine after a season of Gary, Ron, Keith, Howie and Josh on Mets broadcasts. I'm sorry. I am reminded of Mario Cuomo's description of Walter Mondale's candidacy in 1984: "Polenta." (Look it up.) Mario laid the observation off on his mom. Nice going. The Fox crew deserves credit for stamina, as does the umpiring crew. The game got better and better as the hours went on, and any fan had to wonder when position players would start pitching. All the front-office-driven analytics mandating pitching changes (and locked-in power arc swings) run through entire pitching staffs in extra innings. Then Nate Eovaldi performed one of the great World Series relief performances -- 6 innings, 3 hits, 5 strikeouts, one game-ending home run by Max Muncy. His work should be a wakeup call to managers and general managers and analytics geeks everywhere that pitchers can still go multiple innings, getting into a routine, learning as much about the hitters as the hitters are learning about them. The game lasted 7 hours and 20 minutes, took 18 innings, and became an instant classic. I am wondering if some of our friends in far-flung time zones like Israel, Italy, Rio, Japan, etc. were watching or following on the web. That game will blend right into Saturday's game, with the depletion of pitching staffs -- and stresses and strains on players' bodies -- having a major impact. Rest up, you all. |
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