The Vivid Air

Auld Lang Syne

2011-12-31T13:02:00.000-08:00

..which is Scots dialect for "old long since," or the times that have faded and the days that are no more.

A friend's message board post got me thinking about the song, which will doubtlessly be played innumerable times around the world this evening. While I'm sure that I first heard it, as so many of us did, on radio and TV as played by Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians, I really got into learning about OLS when as a teenager I found that it was a poem by Robert Burns, the most venerated writer in Scotland's history of distinguished writers and certainly for his verse in English one of the great poets of our language.

For aficionados of Irish and Scots folk music (or novels - think Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott), all the braes and aulds in the lyric don't pose much or a problem, and most of Burns' poem is in very comprehensible English. However - through the magic of Wikipedia and a computer snipping tool with a bow to Photobucket - here is the full poem and translation into our modern tongue:

And here are two of the many fine versions of the song on YouTube. . First, somewhat as the tune would have been heard before Burns' poem was set to it, the pipes (with orchestra and some great pictures):

And who better to sing the song than one of Scotland's great folk performers, Dougie MacLean:

May we all ne'er forget the days of old long since as we charge bravely in what we all hope and believe will be a great 2012!

The Nick Reynolds Tribute - Lakeside, CA 11/27/11

2011-11-28T15:24:00.000-08:00

Last night's Nick Reynolds Tribute show at Jimmy Dukes' Dark Thirty house concert venue in Lakeside, CA near San Diego was an event that was always delightful, frequently moving, and occasionally bittersweet. Organized largely by Josh Reynolds with some significant help from Triofan John Lee and others, the show featured performances (and as you might expect, virtually every number became a singalong) from members of Nick's extended family, a number of his longtime professional musician friends, and a healthy contingent from Nick's Fantasy Camp years. Also as you might expect from an event celebrating the life of as big-hearted a man as Nick was - the roster of players in those three groups frequently overlapped.

Notables in attendance included George Grove, Greg and Janet Deering of Deering Banjos, Nick's nephew Joey Harris (of a great 90s group The Beat Farmers), singer-songwriter James Lee Stanley, John Stewart's daughter Amy, and Mark Josephs, musician and founder of tenorguitar.com and The Tenor Guitar Hall of Fame. In addition to playing tenor and harmonica (excellently, in both cases), Josephs displayed the plaque that was the official notice of Nick's induction as the premier honoree in The Tenor Guitar HOF.

Josh Reynolds emceed the event, and his quips and tales of his dad and occasional tears of memory were the unifying element of the evening. The show was comprised of two fifteen song sets, with most of the songs naturally being Nick solos or ensemble numbers on which he sang the lead. Many of the songs that any KT fan would expect were part of the program - "MTA," "Hobo's Lullaby," "One More Town," "The Gypsy Rover," "The Mountains of Mourne," "Little Boy," and "Bad Man's Blunder," among many others.

In addition to the hall of fame presentation, another highlight of the evening was relative Mike Marvin's reading of a letter from Nick to his grandmother written in April of 1957. Beyond strictly family matters, Nick informed her that the still-developing trio had fired their agent and were looking for a replacement at a "freelance guy" named Frank Werber, who in Nick's words had "ten times the ability and a hundred times the honesty" of the guy they had dropped. Nick also said that even if the move cost them some bookings, he wasn't scared and was really happy because "we are getting so good that it's scary."

Musical highlights were too numerous to catalog, and there may well be a CD available soon. My own favorites included James lee Stanley's "Badman's Blunder" and "Catch The Wind," FC friend Peter Overly's marvelous rendition of "Mountains of Mourne," Nick's great neice Maddie White's "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" and Josh Reynolds' version of my own all-time favorite Nick solo, "The Wanderer" - as before, among many, many others.

A few pictures now - a bit dim and hazy because they were taken with an inexpensive small camera...

Tom Lamb, John Triofan Lee, George Grove - "Mark Twain"

John Lee, Mikey Burns, George Grove - "Bottle of Wine"

Ensemble Including (L-R) Mike Marvin, Mark Josephs, Mikey Burns, John Lee, Peter Overly, Tom Lamb, George Grove, Joey Harris, Dave Batti

James Lee Stanley and Michael Bettendorf - "Catch The Wind"

Stanley, Grove, and Josh Reynolds - "Badman's Blunder"

Grove, Mike Marvin, Lamb, Maddie White, Stanley, Joey Harris - "Flowers"

Josh Reynolds - "The Wanderer"

Ensemble: Lee, Marvin, Stanley, Grove, Overly, Reynolds, Batti

Many members of the KT/FC extended family were in attendance, including my friends Dan Hartline and George Jensen. When I noted the bittersweet aspect of it all - that Nick was no longer with us - Bakersfield Dan beamed that inimitable smile of his, gestured toward the stage at the performing musicians, and said - "Of course he is."

Amen to that.

Some Vintage KT Reviews

2011-09-06T10:54:00.000-07:00

I posted this article on a message board that does not archive; preserving them here.

Even after the recent revocation of some of the "preview" rights that had enabled Google to include large sections of many copyrighted books online, Google Books remains a remarkable resource. Whilst trolling around this morning in the hundreds of research links that I have bookmarked (sometimes for reasons that I have forgotten) - I came across the following three articles.

First, from the January 12th, 1959 issue of Billboard, a short review of a Kingston Trio show at NYC's legendary Blue Angel night club:

Interesting side note - the Blue Angel was a jazz club primarily. The KT's appearance there in January anticipates its appearance in April at the Newport Jazz Festival (which led to its appearance at the premier newport Folk Festival in July of that year) and the fact that the liner notes to the group's second studio album At Large were written by Downbeat Magazine editor and jazz critic Nat Hentoff. The group is still playing nightclubs primarily at this point; the college shows are yet to come.

From the Nov. 28, 1960 edition of Billboard, a review of a concert at Carneige Hall on 11/23/60:

Interesting - a concert at Carnegie Hall was generally considered the apex of a performing artist's career, but the fact that the KT played there has been one of those under-the-radar facts that never generated much historical note.

Finally, a review from almost a year later - November 6, 1961, from the Windsor Star, this being Windsor, Ontario right across the Detroit River from - Detroit:

Trio fans will find this amusing. Dave Guard had actually left the KT several months before, replaced by John Stewart. The reviewer has confused Guard with Nick Reynolds, who remained with the group for its full ten-year first incarnation.

In Memoriam, Bo Wennstam - 1939-2011

2011-02-19T14:53:00.000-08:00

Bo Wennstam was a friend of mine from the folk music world. We were drawn together by a mutual love of the music of the Kingston Trio, whose sole surviving member Bob Shane broke the news of Bo's death here in the U.S. (Bo was a Swede who lived in Mallorca.) This is a copy of the post I made to the KT message board; there will be more to say about Bo very soon.

Bob Shane's message about the passing of Bo Wennstam, though not unexpected, is still a major blow to all of us who knew him in three dimensions - though his loss is incalculable to those of us who love the Kingston Trio and were acquainted with him only in cyberspace. I believe he would have been happy and proud to know that it was Bob himself who broke the news to us, and the boy inside of Bo even in his latter years - the boy who in Sweden so loved the KT and folk music - would have been deeply gratified that this was so.

Tributes to Bo from his friends are coming in already, and I'd like to share some of them here, as well as direct people to some of Bo's remarkable legacy. But first, taking my cue from Rick Daly's FolkUSA Rogue's Gallery - here is the man himself.

Bo Wennstam

Bo With Good Friends Josh Reynolds (L) and Bert Williams(R)

Bo At FC10 With Fellow Rogue Mick Coates

Completing The FC International Trio Of HellRaisers, Scotland's Tom Craig

Bo loved Fantasy Camp and attended in 2007, 2008, and 2009. He shot and uploaded 324 videos of the event, everything from stage performances (including the very last appearance of the NBJ KT together performing in public) to jam sessions to the wonderful instructional videos of Tom Sanders and Bert Williams. 324 videos. Should this event last 100 years, it will never be covered more comprehensively. The videos are available here:

Bo Wennstam's Fantasy Camp Channel On YouTube

Bo's channel should remain on YouTube as long as the site lasts - there are no maintenance requirements or fees. I believe that some of us with decent computer skills and a bit of time could begin to organize these on a third party site. I've left a comment on the channel and invite any other YouTube registered clients to do so as well.

As a tribute to Bo (who is mentioned here), master musician and FC regular Fred Grittner posted his FC re-write of the classic Kingston Trio song "I'm Going Home" to Bo's FaceBook page. Here it is:

A wonderful tribute indeed as Bo goes home.

It has also become customary in the short life of FaceBook for friends and acquaintances to post a remembrance on a user page when someone passes on. If you are a registered FaceBook member, you can "write on the Wall" of Bo even if you're not a FB friend. His page is here:

Bo Wennstam's FaceBook Page

Bo's good friend Tom O'Donnell recorded one of Bo's favorite songs by former KT player John Stewart called "Some Kind Of Love," and friend Max Schwartz created a video montage of pictures of Bo and Fantasy Camp to go with the music. They sent it to Bo in early December, so Bo had the chance to see and appreciate Tom's work on behalf of their friendship.

As I believe many of us already know from decades of living and the losses that that entails, we will feel Bo's absence most intensely when we, God willing, all assemble again where we knew him best, next August in Scottsdale. To say that Bo's spirit will hover over and with us might seem to be a sentimental cliche - except that those of us who knew him and his complete love of all things Kingston realize how thoroughly true it is. "I am a part of all that I have met," wrote Tennyson in Ulysses, and all of us who knew Bo will carry that part of him that touched us til the end of our own days.

A Primary Source: Review Of The 1959 Newport Folk Festival

2011-01-28T20:00:00.000-08:00

My friend Mary Katherine Aldin - she of the radio show that we appear on, voting member of the executive committee of the NARAS (Grammy people) who are giving the KT the upcoming award, officer of the Folk Alliance, producer and liner note writer for the KT Newport CD, and more - has in her home what is likely the most remarkable folk archive in the U.S., tens of thousands of items from posters to vinyl albums to handwritten notes from EVERYbody, plus articles. Tonight she sent me this, knowing my interest in the KT. It is the first review (from the NY Daily News, I believe) of the triumphant KT appearance at the Newport Folk Festival of 1959. The writer garbles some song names and facts, but this is first-hand account with a picture I've never seen before of of that seminal event.

I cannot resize this further to embed here, but if you double click on the picture, it will take you to the image on Photobucket. Once there, put your cursor on the top of the picture and you'll see some menu tabs, including one for "Resize." Put the cursor on that anc click "More Options," and you will get an editable image for which you can use the slider - about 200% is good.

Another Nick Reynolds Tribute

2010-10-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Kreps, Rolling Stone Magazine, 10/2/08:

Kingston Trio Founding Member Nick Reynolds Dead at 75

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Daniel Kreps

Nick Reynolds, one of the founding members of folk group the Kingston Trio, died today at a San Diego hospital. He was 75. Reynolds was in the hospital’s ICU for several weeks before his family made the decision today to take him off life support. As the guitarist for the Kingston Trio, Reynolds performed on the band’s hits like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Tom Dooley,” which was a Number One song in 1958 and won them a Grammy. The trio won their second Grammy the following year for their album The Kingston Trio At Large. The band is also credited with helping to usher in the folk movement that ultimately spawned artists like Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

“Nobody could nail a harmony part like Nick. He could hit it immediately, exactly where it needed to be, absolutely note perfect — all on the natch. Pure genius,” said Bob Shane, who with the passing of Reynolds is now the lone surviving Trio member. Original member Dave Guard died in 1991 of cancer, and his replacement John Stewart passed away earlier this year from a brain aneurysm. Reynolds is survived by his wife, two sons and two daughters.

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A Rare Folk Recording: Art & Paul, "Puff The Magic Dragon"

2010-08-29T15:20:00.001-07:00

Art and Paul, a legendary but short-lived Greenwich Village-based folk duo from the late 1950s and early 1960s, perform a version of the now-classic children's song "Puff, The Magic Dragon" recorded in 1961, two years prior to the release of Peter, Paul and Mary's far more famous rendition.

Art Podell and Paul Potash were friends who joined musically in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, just at the time when the "pop folk" boom that had originated largely on the West Coast began to bring attention to the plethora of talented musicians and songwriters who had already been working in the Village, in some cases for years.

Podell and Potash were painstaking in their arrangements, sometimes taking weeks to work out the nuances of a single song. They were rewarded with a loyal following in clubs and concerts and with a contract with major label Columbia Records, which was looking to cash in on the burgeoning folk boom but as yet had no folk artists in their stable of performers.

The duo's first Columbia release, Art and Paul: Songs of Earth and Sky[1960] is today regarded as a lost classic; copies of the record are very hard to find and sell at top dollar to folk aficionados when they become available. Earth and Sky led to the recording of a second album, Hangin', Drinkin' and Stuff[1961] before Art and Paul left for the West Coast, where without either consistent bookings or record sales they disbanded. In 1962, Podell became a member of the folk ensemble The New Christy Minstrels, a group that Potash joined two years later during the height of its considerable popularity.

Prior to the bit of fame and fortune enjoyed by Art and Paul, Podell had become friends back in Greenwich Village with another struggling young folksinger, Peter Yarrow. Yarrow's roommate at Cornell University, Leonard Lipton, had written a fragmentary children's poem about a dragon that Yarrow had completed and for which had written a melody. Yarrow shared the newly-completed "Puff, The Magic Dragon" with Podell right around the time that Warner Brothers Records, also looking for a successful folk act, had united Yarrow with Noel "Paul" Stookey and the late Mary Travers to form the trio Peter, Paul and Mary.

As Art Podell's introduction on this rare recording indicates, the Art and Paul duo was so taken with Yarrow's composition that they added it to their concert sets. The recording here features Podell's and Potash's distinctive arranging style in rhythm and harmony.

Video images are of Art and Paul, of their first album, of other albums on which Podell played, along with later pictures of the New Christy Minstrels and Podell in a recent photo.

More Historical Fun Facts And Charts: And These Guys Are NOT In The Grammy Hall of Fame?

2010-08-18T01:03:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Happy to report that the post title is no longer true. On December 22, 2010, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS - the Grammy people) announced that the Kingston Trio was to be given the Lifetime Achievement award on 2/13/11 - and this is essentially the Grammy HOF.

The following chart facts were culled from Joel Whitburn's Top Pop Albums, the 2001 edition. Whitburn and his Record Research, Inc. are about the last word in accuracy about record sales charts, and he has a new edition of the book just out.

The dominance in the last decade of Jay-z and other hip hop artists suggests that the KT's rank may slip a bit in some of the categories below - but some are cemented in history, like "most weeks with a charting album by decade," where the KT's rank is permanent.

Note that most of these chart summaries refer to position on the charts or appearance on them and do not refer to total record sales. Still - very impressive.

It Was Five - Not Four, Not One

2010-08-16T18:58:00.000-07:00

(This post is being uploaded here by request; it appears now on a website that does not archive its posts.)
Since the publication of The Kingston Trio On Record in 1986, many if not most Trio fans became aware (if they had not been before) that our favorite group established a milestone in entertainment history in 1959 when they had four albums simultaneously in the Top Ten of Billboard's Top LPs chart, now known as the Billboard 200.

The note about this in KTOR on p. 37 mentions the date of December 7, 1959 and lists the albums and their chart positions. Nowhere do Allan Shaw & Co. say that this was the only week for the Trio achievement (and achievement it was; even the Beatles only ever managed to place three) - but dozens and scores of commentators have inferred that KTOR's meaning was just that - one remarkable week, but that's all. You'll see allusions to that all over the internet - AllMusic, Amazon, many many more.

In the months after I finished my KT Wikipedia article, I've continued quietly to refine it, rewrite it to overcome some of the edits that were forced into it by evaluators, and to provide more definitive sources. In the process of doing so, I discovered - so I thought - that the KT had accomplished the four albums thing in four consecutive weeks, not one, and I rewrote the Wiki accordingly and mentioned the fact here.

Well, pride goeth before the fall, and I have been done in by my own hubris. I just didn't check thoroughly enough. Unlike Allan and Co in '86 - we have Google Books today and every single issue of Billboard from the 1930s forward online and complete. The tale it tells is even more impressive, as the correct number of weeks is five. Rather than make anyone click away to see - take a look, with dates:

11/16/59

11/23/59

11/30/59

12/7/59

12/14/59

These, of course, are .pdfs of the pages from the actual magazine - not summaries.

I'm not sure that this seemed as big a deal at the time as it does today (or should). Why not?

1) The country was not as statistic-maniacal as it is today;

2) The guys were young and weren't making much $$$$$ off of this: the record company got most of it, and successful records were mainly a springboard to successful $$$$-making concert tours;

3) The album charts themselves were pretty new, relatively.

4) 33 1/3rpm albums were pretty new and sales of them were not yet the hallmark of a performer's success that they would become. The KT had a lot to do with making that so.

Before you can change a public perception, you have to say something - even a factual something - over and over and over again before it roots in the public consciousness as fact. So let's all get busy setting the record straight on this. Tell someone. A neighbor. Your mother-in-law. Strangers on the street. This was a remarkable thing to happen, and it's now all but forgotten.

I only hope that when the committee to secure a place for the KT in the Grammy Hall of Fame next meets with the brass that they do so armed with the correct facts. Tell 'em that you saw it here.

Addendum, 12/29/10

And someone apparently did. Happy to report that on December 22, 2010, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS - the Grammy people) announced that the Kingston Trio was to be given the Lifetime Achievement award on 2/13/11 - and this is essentially the Grammy HOF.

A Promise Fulfilled

2010-02-20T22:38:00.000-08:00

(Note: This was originally posted in June of 2007 at the time of the event. That post was spammed with 84 comments in Japanese promoting a product, so I'm deleting it and re-posting the article now.)

Philip S. Gutierrez was formally inducted as a trial judge on the federal bench for the Central District of California on June 13, 2007. A graduate of Cantwell High School in Montebello, California in 1977, the University of Notre Dame in 1981, and UCLA Law School in 1984, Judge Gutierrez invited several members of the judiciary and the bar to speak at his induction. The only speaker who was not involved in the legal community was the author of this blog, Judge Gutierrez's teacher for all four of his high school years. Following are my remarks at the ceremony.

Induction Of The Hon. Philip Gutierrez
Judge, US Federal District Court
June 13, 2007

Honorable members of the Judiciary and the Bar, and family and friends of Phil Gutierrez -

I have known Phil Gutierrez for just under thirty four years, since he was a freshman at Cantwell High School in Montebello. It is just a few days past the thirtieth anniversary of Phil's graduation from Cantwell - June 1, 1977 - a date that I have a multitude of reasons to remember, not the least of which was the salutatorian speech that Phil delivered that beautiful late afternoon, in which he urged his classmates "never to stop living, never to get smothered into something unwanted, but most of all to live as people" - part of the definition of which, he had earlier asserted, was being "not afraid to touch, or to be touched."

I am struck, these three decades later, by how thoroughly Phil has lived out that credo himself, though as I found out in an hour's conversation last night, he has long forgotten exactly what he said that day.

It should surprise no one here, I think, that many of the qualities that characterize Phil today were in evidence in the boy I first knew in the Seventies. He had, for example, the same dogged persistence that at its best was a hall mark of his genuine scholarship but could also at times be trying and even verge on the annoying. When Phil had a point to make, he could argue it until you were tempted to give in to him out of sheer exhaustion. More commonly, when he had a question, he would pursue its implications until he had found an answer that satisfied him, typically an extended and once again frequently exhausting process.

Some of the earliest and most treasured memories of my long career as a teacher were the frequent, almost daily visits to my classroom after school by Phil and a friend or two to pursue further some issue that had arisen in class, or to render some judgment on the state of world affairs, or to vent some anger at whatever the latest outrage that had occurred at out school was. Usually, the echoes of the dismissal bell hadn't even subsided before he was in my room, standing politely for often an hour or more to the side of my desk, to badger, to listen, to argue, to persuade - to do all that was necessary to nurture a developing intellect of the range and depth that I know characterize him to this day. Phil was the first genuine student I had and remains all these years later perhaps the most complete of the nearly ten thousand I have taught.

I was delighted by Phil's continued growth in college. Many of you know that he went to Notre Dame, but I'm not sure if it is as commonly known that he turned down Stanford and Yale to do so. I was pleased by his choice, really not primarily because I went there as well, but rather more because I felt that sending this dynamo of energy and questions into the heart of a bastion of white, traditional, Middle American Catholicism would be good for both him and for the institution. For Phil, I hoped that Notre Dame would challenge him as it had challenged me to live a life of meaning and affect, to become in the oft-quoted words of Gandhi "the change you seek in the world." For our now-shared alma mater, I hoped that Phil would help to break down some of the calcified and narrow perceptions of what it meant to be scholarly, or Catholic, or American. Though I am not sure in what shape Notre Dame survived the encounter, Phil flourished there, and part of the arc of his career is, I think, attributable to a pre-existing moral centeredness that was enhanced and nurtured by his years in South Bend.

Whether or not Phil exactly intended to do so when he asked me to say a few words today, I am here as a link to that past of his that includes Notre Dame and Cantwell High School. I regard myself today as a stand-in for all of the teachers of his early life - for the late Joe Richards, social studies instructor extraordinaire and the other teachers and coaches who helped him grow through adolescence; for Father Richard McBrien, former theology department chair at Notre Dame whom Phil identified as his greatest professor in college and whose compassionate and courageous moral stances have cost him dearly throughout his career - and for all the professors at Notre Dame and UCLA who contributed to his formation as an intellect and a scholar; and even, if it is not too presumptuous so to suggest, for his first and greatest teacher, his late mother, whose dedication to his growth and education permeates this chamber as surely as if she were here in the flesh.

On that June evening thirty years ago when Phil addressed his assembled teachers and family and friends and started the journey that has taken him to this place and this day, he began to become the change that he seeks - as one of the first and surprisingly and distressingly few Latino jurists in the federal court system, as a force for what is good and just in society at large, as a role model for other young people of challenges and background similar to his own. When Phil spoke that evening of living as fully humanly as possible, he was paraphrasing, I believe, the last poem we studied in his English class, "I Think Continually" by Stephen Spender, who asserts that to be "truly great," in the words of the poem, it is necessary "never to allow gradually the traffic/To smother with noise and fog the flowering of the spirit." Spender's peroration is splendid and most apropos today - he urges us to emulate

"The names of those, who in their lives, fought for life -

Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun,

And left the vivid air signed with their honor."

I am confident that as he has in the past, the Honorable Philip S. Gutierrez will continue to write his name, large and with honor, across this phase of his life and career. Congratulations, Your Honor.

The Eagles' Timothy B. Schmit Remembers Nick Reynolds

2010-01-30T11:38:00.000-08:00

PASSING THE TORCH

Like many rock musicians who came of musical age in the 1960s, Schmit started off in the early 1960s playing folk music in an acoustic trio. That trio — Tim, Ron & John — was modeled after the Kingston Trio, the highly influential group co-founded by San Diegans Nick Reynolds and John Stewart.

Reynolds died here late last year at age 75. Schmit credits him as a key influence and proudly notes that he got to befriend Reynolds barely half a year before his death: “Tim, Tom & Ron was a Kingston Trio copycat band and Nick was the guy I copied. I even got a tenor guitar like him, although mine was a cheap imitation.

“Nick’s wife called me early last year to ask if I’d play at a memorial concert for John Stewart, and I said ‘Absolutely.’ I didn’t know Nick would be there. He was in a wheelchair and we had a really good talk. His son told me Nick had all these old instruments and the family has entrusted me as the caretaker of Nick’s tenor guitar, which is a thrill to have. The Reynolds family is trusting me with it, which is unbelievable to me.”

GEORGE VARGA
from timothybschmit.com

"The first singing group I was in, we were such fans of the Kingston Trio that we dressed exactly like them and sang their songs. In fact I just found a really great picture. We're rehearsing for our first gig and I'm 14 years old. I'm looking at it right now because I've gotta put it on my Web site. And I'm playing a tenor guitar just like Nick Reynolds of the Kingston Trio did. About 6 months before Nick Reynolds died (in October 2008), I finally got to meet him. I became friends with he and his wife. He was pretty ill and somewhat incapacitated, but he was the sweetest guy. I have his tenor guitar right in my studio here, sort of on indefinite loan for me to keep. It's the same guitar that played on "Tom Dooley," some of those old hits. Don't get me started! They were definitely a big influence on me."

from Dean Goodman's Interview On MySpace

Just For Fun

2008-07-13T10:17:00.000-07:00

I've spun off two new blog pages in the last week or so to accommodate my more specifically musical interests and (to a smaller degree) in response to several requests for pages on these specific topics.

First, I've begun to assemble different elements into a memorial page for the late Americana/folk/roots music singer-songwriter John Stewart, who died in January at the age of 68. I've known of and followed Stewart since about 1960, and only when he died did I fully realize the impact that his music had had on me.

This page is in its formative stages, and I expect it to grow over time to include more reminiscences, more music, and more perspective. Right now, it's a good source for links and a pleasant place to see some Stewart videos without the clutter of YouTube:

The John Stewart Memorial Page

I was also asked to insure that some posts I'd written to one of the music discussion groups to which I contribute wouldn't disappear after they "fell off" the pages, as this board - Kingston Crossroads, discussing both the Kingston Trio and folk/roots music in general - has no permanent archive.

The posts in question included different video performances of songs originally recorded by the Kingston Trio and subsequently covered by others, at times more famously. I also give a brief history of each song and some comments on the performances - it's called "Comparative Video 101" and is here:

Comparative Video 101

Both of these tend to be updated with a bit more regularity than The Vivid Air since I'm doing a lot more work in music these days with the release of a group CD I produced, remixed, and mastered (and of course performed on) called "The Chilly Winds: Live In Colorado" and a solo album that I'm currently putting together.

Stop by these pages and check out the notes and videos.

Place And Privilege

2008-06-10T13:58:00.000-07:00

(Alissa Costello, J.K. Moran)

On Sunday June 8, 2008, I attended my thirty-fifth high school graduation ceremony as a teacher. These are always poignant late afternoons, suffused as they are with the joys of youth and the moment and the melancholy of goodbyes that only age can comprehend.

This year's graduation at Mayfield Senior School in Pasadena, California - my professional home these many years - was graced by an extraordinary valedictory address by an extraordinary young lady. Alissa Costello was elected senior class president for the Class of '08 a year ago, and the chief and final duty of this position at our school is to deliver an address to and on behalf of her classmates at graduation, the only student to speak at the ceremony. Alissa, one of the most distinguished students in her class and one of the most impressive I have ever encountered in the long decades of my career, rose to the moment with an address that was at once playful and heartfelt, emotional and intellectual - just exactly what a graduation speech should be. That her classmates and the assembled audience appreciated it goes without saying.

Its larger significance, though, I believe to be the credit it reflects by extension on many young people too often belittled, minimized, and disregarded by their elders for their perceived behavior, attitudes, preferences, tastes in music and entertainment, and just about everything else - "slackers," they are often called and depicted as. The generational hubris of doing so is appalling - as if millions of individuals could be lumped into or expressed by any term, be it "Boomer" or "Gen X" or "Greatest Generation" or any other such nonsense.

Alissa Costello is none of these. She is simply a gifted and thoughtful young woman who will be developing her considerable abilities at Harvard come autumn. She speaks here for herself and her classmates only - but for me, her voice in these words resounds with a kind of hope and affirmation that suggest to me that when the torch is passed, it will be eagerly received by some very capable hands. This is what she said.

Good Evening, and Welcome......

In considering the significance of today, I am led to what John Steinbeck said of the morning dawn: “It is the hour of the pearl. The interval between day and night, when time stops and examines itself.”

For the 76 Mayfield students on this platform, it is our “hour of the pearl.” Today, we are called to examine ourselves—the ‘was, is, and will be’— in preparation for the dawn.

When I pause to inspect the range of desires and impulses, the variety of insecurities and hesitations, the many moments of confusion and success, no surprise— it’s daunting.

I realize now that high school

is ceaseless yearning,

is profound uncertainty,

is joyous disorder,

and is adolescent shouts, like that of John Cusack in Say Anything, when he yells:

“I’m [just] looking for a dare-to-be-great situation.”

And yet, in spite of all this, here we stand, fully intact and looking ahead.

2008 poses a new season of conflict for us. So maybe, in this hour of the pearl, we can identify just what gives us the audacity to question our own futures, the daring to seek our own greatness.

To outsiders, Mayfield a gated campus with manicured lawns; a marble entryway with trimmed foliage. When you pass through the front gate, you are instantly aware of Privilege. Considering the opportunities given to us, the profound care and attention provided, I am drawn to wonder at this hour of the pearl:

What is the essence of Privilege?

If you were to ask the students what Mayfield is, a number of standard responses might be delivered:

Freshman might say: 300 girls.

Sophomores might say: no boys.

Juniors might say: no sleep.

But, I see Mayfield—through our uniforms

I have a Sue Mills uniform shirt sitting on my dresser—still in the plastic package. Folded, crisp—unworn…

At Mayfield, seniors are liberated from their uniforms for the final 3 weeks of school, encouraged to donate those un-sharpied, un-stapled, untattered items to the Used Uniform Sale.

So— why do I still have an unused white oxford?

Somehow, I managed to avoid opening this final package all year. When I finally acknowledged this evasion, I realized, that I was unable to face its implications.

It has become, over the year, the constant reminder of a waning childhood—

the indicator of a Privilege it took me 18 years to understand.

When I pack for college, I will encounter my Mills oxford shirt, still wrapped. I will run my eyes over its contents, and indulge for a moment in the lingering echoes of Monday morning reunions— always as if a weekend merits reunion.

Each one of us has been identified as a Mayfield student, at least once, by our uniform.

As a matter of fact, on my second day at Mayfield, while walking home, an unknown white car pulled up next to me, and the driver said, “Hop in, I’ll give you a lift.” Although I didn’t recognize the car, I immediately recognized the face.

Sr. Barbara… did not know me, but she knew my uniform...

Sometimes, when I walk down the street under the blare of my headphones, I’ve felt eyes on me, and turned to see stares.
The glance only grazes my face, quickly proceeding to my white Oxford and red Pleats.

I can feel the silent conclusions being drawn: prep, protected, sheltered, wealthy, naïve, and finally, the kicker, Privileged.

Tucked away under the pulse of Jimi Hendrix, I would cast my eyes back to the cement wondering,

“what is this privilege they project on to my uniform?”

I had been categorized and dismissed.

Eventually, I found myself staring back, challenging them for what they assumed.

Over the years I realized that what the stares failed to see was the truth behind the uniform. Privilege? Absolutely.

But not in the way they had imagined. Not even in the way I had imagined.

Ours—was the privilege of relationship,

the privilege of expectation

the privilege of choice.

I have come to understand that the white oxford and red pleats DO in fact, characterize Privilege.

This gated community of majestic buildings and manicured lawns is NOT a reflection of indulgence, but rather of the conscious and deliberate decision to provide freedom.

The Privilege suggested in my uniform, is an offer of freedom to transcend and to thrive—the freedom to desire and then to choose.

I now recognize— that the undeniable Privilege bestowed upon our adolescence is an offer of possibility.

We have been given the Privilege to pause—the Privilege to dream in preparation for choice;

Through the sacrifice and intention of parents who were available far beyond tuition payments— available to make countless trips

late at night to Kinko’s for project deadlines,

or early in the morning to Party City for birthday balloons.

But more than that— parents are here everyday for board meetings, committee meetings, breakfasts, teas, lunches, barbeques;

available to attend performances, openings, concerts, games;

available to engage in extended dialogues about our future, and our plans.

Our voices are encouraged; our voices are heard.

We have been afforded privilege through the determination and wonder of an astonishing faculty, who would

come in at lunch for an emergency review of cellular mitosis,

or pass around licorice during a test to ease the mental strain.

We have experienced privilege at the hands of a dedicated and selfless maintenance and security team.

Ultimately, it is to them that I dedicate this commencement speech from the class of 2008, because I think they are the metaphor at the essence of privilege.

Though usually unseen, they construct runways on the lawn for ceremonies and fashion shows, and of course— Graduations;

they battle spring storms with sheets of tent plastic, protecting afternoon tea parties. They are here to greet me when I drive in, and to say goodbye when I leave.

But where does this Privilege lead? At the core of what we have been provided through the purpose and generosity of our parents, faculty, maintenance, security, administration and staff, is the privilege to seek— To seek our own pearl.

An identity has NOT been thrust upon us here. Rather, we have been challenged and guided, we have been privileged, to create the self, that may now be reflected upon in this hour.

Essentially, Mayfield recognizes that supreme protection must be guaranteed if choice is to become possible.

Roz Kaveney notes that in the modern age, “our imaginations have been colonized.” Mayfield has battled this occupation by granting us the Privilege to be fearless;

fearless to investigate and construct an identity through expansive imagination.

The Privilege we have been offered, can only be seen through our authenticity. When the Great ‘08 is out in the community, Mayfield radiates from within them, and all anyone can see, is the resulting light.

Surrounded by the community of young women I have come to take absolute solace in, I could sit here— on the gate forever.

But as dawn turns to day, the hour of the pearl draws to a close.

While we cannot be entirely sure what to do with the possibility beyond those gates, we must pass through them.

Only now that I must exit the gates, can I truly appreciate entering them.

When I recall meeting my classmates freshman year, I do not remember appearances, because those were shared— simple white oxford and red pleats.

I remember the sounds of their voices—the nature of their ideas and beliefs.

Long after I have left Mayfield, when I reflect upon the group of girls I spent my adolescence with, I will not remember the surfaces.

I will remember who they were.

I will remember who they became.

I can now confess— that I am a reluctant traveler.

While my eyes sparkle at the idea of what’s to come, and the choices that await— I am SO happy here.

I am attached to my town—my coffee-shop, record store, video-store—

my friends, my Mom—my life.

But Privilege has prepared us to leave.

And I will go.

We will go.

But my heart— my heart will always be here.

Thank you Mayfield.

Folk And Faux

2008-05-10T12:22:00.001-07:00

Maybelle, Sarah, and A.P. Carter(L) Woody Guthrie (R)

:Harrison Ford. mentioned that in college he hosted a folk music and
: blues show. Leno asked him who the hot acts were - "would it be the Kingston
: Trio" (well, THAT got my attention) and Ford's answer was peculiar...he said
: something along the lines of; no, he did the "REAL, ORIGINAL folk music like
: B.B. King"...WHAT?! I thought the Kingston Trio was about as real and original as you
: could get in those days!

--Betty Cominsky on Kingston Crossroads

Well, I guess it just means that old controversies never die - and they never really fade away, either.

First, as an almost 50 year KT fan, I wouldn't take any exception whatsoever to Ford's remarks. I remind all of the prominence of the Dave Guard quotation in the liner notes of the very first album. This is from memory, but I'm betting it's very close to the actual quote :

"We're not folksingers in the accepted sense of the word," says Dave Guard, acknowledged leader of the group."But it was our interest in this kind of music that brought us together."

Clearly, at the very beginning of things and at every turn since, the KT never claimed to be purveyors of "folk music." That they became identified as such by the general public - and to the chagrin of people who identified themselves as "real" folksingers, in Greenwich Village and elsewhere - is doubly ironic given Guard's up-front comment and Bob Shane's continual reiteration of the same.

The outrage of folk purists at the "commercialization" and "popularization" of traditional music by the KT was ironic in its disingenuous rejection of the attention that the Trio brought to what had been before them (a few songs by the Weavers, Gateway Singers, and folkier efforts by the massively popular Belafonte excepted) a strictly niche market of no Grammy, virtually no widespread airplay - and negligible sales.

The Trio's phenomenal popularity in its first two years especially (late 1958 through early 1961, the peak time of their record sales according to KTOR and other sources) changed all three of those permanently and opened the door for everything that followed - as we fans know but the general public has forgotten. (Digression/allusion - as I noted below in my post about the JS tribute - both Timothy B. Schmitt of the Eagles and Lindsey Buckingham were lavish in their praise of the Trio - Schmitt: "When I was 13 or 14, I was way into the Trio....(smiles) WAY WAY into the Trio (Laughs)... WAY WAY WAY into the Trio." - describing then what we all did, pouring over pics and liners, wearing out grooves....)

Many a true folkie paid his/her rent with money generated by an actual and not mythical example of trickle down economics, with the hurricane of Trio sales spinning off into golden showers all around the landscape of acoustic music.

But there's more, much more. Many of the various patron saints of of true folkiedom did exactly what the Trio did - but neither as smoothly or as lucratively. Cases in point:

1) A.P. Carter: Remember John Stewart's quip on College Concert about stumbling into the local coffee house with a tape recorder and automatic copyrighting machine? Well, change "coffee house" to "holler" or "rural front porch" and you have AP's exact modus operandi. His extended trips away from his family were usually song-gathering expeditions; he'd return home with a passel of field recordings, work out arrangements with his wife and sister, hit the recording studio - and sell lots of records. And oh yes and by the way - copyrighting his usually slight rearrangements of what he had heard. Does this sound familiar? Yet AP Carter is a figure of reverence in folk circles, and NBD (who did a lot more updated traditional folk numbers than NBJ) are derided to this day for doing the same.

2) Woody Guthrie: Woody was far from the rube image that he half-created for himself (and was half attached by the public) - he was smart, sophisticated, and canny. (I always thought that our local business sharpie and promoter extraordinaire Bob Shane would have gotten along really well with WG). Guthrie wrote many great songs and sang as many traditional ones - but he was not in the least troubled by taking old tunes and rewriting them with his own words. There are dozens of examples of this, but KT fans would be most familiar with the rewrites of "Wildwood Flower" into "The Sinking of the Reuben James" and "Pretty Polly" into "Pastures of Plenty."

3) The Weavers: The earliest Weavers' recordings showed much of the same musical fidelity to traditional sources as the slightly later New Lost City Ramblers did (and like the Ramblers had that odd costume thing going [tuxes and suits vs. vests and ties]. But the Weavers always played fast and loose with material. They recorded original songs by Lee Hays ("The Hammer Song," "Wasn't That A Time" and more), Hellerman ("Two Soldiers" and more) and Seeger's rewrites of "Wimoweh," "We Shall Overcome," and many many more. Take for example just one (great) Weavers album - Traveling On. The liner notes themselves describe massive rewrites and additions to "Twelve Gates To The City," "Greenland Whale Fisheries," and "Oh Sinner Man." All were traditional, but no 19th century whaler or camp-meeting congregation ever sang what the Weavers did.

And by now, thanks to the Trio - the music industry category of "folk" is exactly what the purists of the 50s and early 60s hated - commercialized pop music done by performers who aren't really even truly acoustic any more and who are writing their own material without even a feint in the direction of traditional authenticity any more. Talk about ironic.

No less a cultural luminary in America than The New Yorker magazine addresses the issue (and makes a single positive reference to the Kingston Trio) in its April 28th issue in a long article entitled Where can folk music still be found?. Unfortunately, it's not yet available online or I'd post it here. It's long, but it propounds and tries to preserve the definition of what folk mean to people like the Lomaxes and Moses Asch - and what it still means at universities around the world. (One of the great programs in folklore anywhere is at UCLA - and they don't do Dylan and "singer-songwriters" in the music classes in the program - they do real folk music. So does the Seattle Folk Life Festival - a story for another time.)

So I'm guessing Harrison Ford was trying to make the same distinctions of "traditional" versus "commercial." I didn't see the show, but I doubt his comment was barbed in any way.

We'll just have to wait for Bill Bush and Bob Shane to finish their books and hope that the promotional flair that Bob has always exhibited will take the true tale to at least some of the general public.

The John Stewart Memorial

2008-05-04T01:40:00.000-07:00

Oh I live in California
I can look out at the ocean
On the silver blue Pacific
It is always there to see
But I'm so busy working
That I don't have time to see it
But it's the knowing that it's there
That means lot to me

- John Stewart, "Botswanna," Punch The Big Guy (1988)

As with so many of John Stewart's songs, this particular lyric hit me with especial forcefulness, this time as I emerged from the McClure Tunnel off of I-10 and onto PCH, heading north on a perfectly crystalline spring afternoon, toward Malibu and Pepperdine University's Smothers Theater for the official family-sponsored tribute to perhaps the most remarkable and certainly least appreciated songwriter of his generation, and - as both the mellowed Stewart of later years was proud to claim and as the tribute underscored with ample evidence - an integral part of the storied history of the Kingston Trio.

Coming out of the tunnel, I saw the silver blue Pacific for the first time in I don't know how many months - and found myself wishing that it hadn't been so long, which is about the same way I felt if I skipped a JS performance that I could have made with a bit more effort.

It was one of the most extraordinary evenings of music that I have ever enjoyed.

The location was perfect, as was the 5 pm starting time. Pepperdine is located on dramatically sloping, intensely green hills at the point where Malibu Canyon opens onto the strand leading to the beaches. It is an architectural gem set into a dramatically beautiful California landscape with which it is in complete harmony. Both the university and the coast itself put on their Sunday best in the hours leading up to the sun's daily dramatic plunge into that silver blue expanse.

The Stewart family planned an event that seemed not nearly long enough at 3 hours and 40 minutes non-stop. Just when you'd think that the music couldn't get any better - it did, often in unexpected ways. And the video tributes from those who could not attend - including an eloquent John Glenn and a clearly emotional Scott Carpenter and Roseanne Cash - were sublime.

And the moments - a wheel chair-bound Nick Reynolds joking about his impaired speech and still recounting an emotional bond with JS eloquently, RFK's son Max regarding Stewart as a father figure, MC Mikael Stewart kissing Nick on the cheek when Nick had finished, Mikael having to pause for a long minute after the John Stewart band had rocked out a song, saying "You know, sometimes you forget just how great so many of those songs were..."

The surprise high point for me was the appearance of Eagle Timothy B. Schmitt, who like so many of us was a Trio-maniac in his teens ("I was the Nick Reynolds") and then launching into a perfect "Chilly Winds."

The John Stewart Band - Dave Batti of course, but absolute heavyweights Dave Crossland and Chuck McDermott were superb. Crossland's "Armstrong" was mesmerizing, and his superlative reading of "Mother Country" lived up to its billing from those who saw him do it in the east Coast tributes. McDermott was just plain amazing on song after song - a real major musician. The We Five did two JS songs and "You Were On My Mind" flawlessly.

The spontaneously generated trio of MFQ vets Chip Douglas (almost DG's replacement and the Monkee's manager who brought a certain Stewart song to the group)and Henry Diltz plus musician and former child star Bill Mumy (Twilight Zone) doing a letter perfect "Molly Dee" - with Russ Kunkel - THE Russ Kunkel to anyone who followed more than Trio music in the 60s and 70s - on congas, and other percussion all evening.

Obviously, Lindsey Buckingham showed up - with a lovely version of "Lock All The Windows" and a blazing rendition of Gold with the band.

You knew Davey Jones would be last - but he surprised me at least with a heartfelt rendition of one of my favorite all time JS songs, She Believes In Me - which Douglas had brought to the Monkees with Daydream Believer, which of course closed the evening. Quite a sight it was, too, to see Schmitt and Buckingham sharing a mic at the rear of the stage with everyone else from the evening, including Buffy Stewart, Nick Reynolds, the whole Stewart band, and more - rocking chorus after chorus with the entire audience in that beautiful theater standing and singing and clapping.

I myself choked up frequently and quietly in the dark, coming to terms for perhaps the first time just how completely Stewart's music had settled itself into the inner recesses of my soul through all the decades of my life. California Bloodlines, Some Kind of Love, Armstrong - times and places and people now long gone came flooding back to me with virtually every song.

But maybe the most affecting was when Dave Crossland sang a plaintive tune penned by a man not yet thirty, coming to a melancholy reality some forty years later -

But I'm believing, believing,
Believing that even when I'm gone -
Maybe some lonesome picker will find some healing in this song.

Reflecting On "Tom Dooley" After 50 Years

2008-04-20T13:56:00.000-07:00

A Scene From Karen W. Reynolds' Play

Tom Dooley: A Wilkes County Legend"

Sometime this week at current rates, our Chilly Winds' video of Tom Dooley on YouTube will pass the 30,000 views mark, making it our most popular upload by far. I am proud to say that of the dozens of versions on the web, ours is second only to the Kingston Trio itself, whose version from the 1981 Reunion Concert weighs in at 70,000 plus views (making it, I'm pretty sure, the most viewed single file of any of the now scores of videos of the group that YouTubers have posted in the last year and a half).

I hope Xroaders have seen theirs and ours. I dressed up the audio for ours for our upcoming CD and you can hear it here:

The Chilly Winds: Tom Dooley

The popularity on YT of the song is odd for a whole host of reasons, and the odyssey of the song itself from its origin to this point in time is strange. I figured that our version of The Gypsy Rover uploaded at the same time exactly a year ago would have outpointed TD by a mile, given the incredible popularity of Irish folk music online and on TV in the last few years. Well, our GR is closing in on 9,000 views and is the #1 version on YT - but our Tom Dooley hit 1,000 in three days and has never looked back.

And yet the song gets so little respect. I've been to the last five fantasy camps, and I have never heard the song performed from the stage or suggested and sung in any of the never-ending jams I've been a part of. It never appears on any of the "favorite song" polls occasionally conducted by KT fans. I've never heard it on oldies radio over the air (and once in a while I do hear MTA or Tijuana Jail or A Worried Man).

But TD is the only single song of the hundreds recorded by the Trio to be recognized by the Grammy people, both with the now famous first award for a C&W performance in 1959 and as #88 on the 100 Greatest records of all time.

The song remains controversial. Our upload generated a number of semi-negative comments, and there are more videos on YT of people making serious attempts to do something like the original Grayson/Whitter version from 1929 popularized by Doc Watson in recent decades (whose YT version has but - gulp - 13,000 views). Jeremy Raven did an excellent piece here two or three years ago complete with pictures and audio files - and yes, the Grayson of the duo was related to the Grayson who captured Dula.

Doc's version on YT is part of a documentary and not complete, but here's a band doing TD in its original form:

I've been surprised at FC at how many KT fans know primarily the Stereo Concert
version (which was not the Record of the Year) and not the original album
cut/single in glorious mono. So - here's what sold six million copies:

I'd guess that most KT fans know the murky story of their acquisition of the song.
They allegedly ( KTOR p. 27) heard it at an open mic audition on 8/27/57 at the
Purple Onion and decided to include it on the first album, with Dave Guard grabbing
a copyright for the arrangement (and the subsequent writer royalties ).

But I always suspected part of the story. Most people don't learn a song after listening to it once. I've always guessed that Dave had a copy of John A. and Alan Lomax's 1947 Folk Songs Of North America, which includes seven songs that appear on the first album, including Tom Dooley with the exact words the Trio uses and the exact tune, adapted according to the Lomaxes by folkies Frank Warner and Frank Profitt from the Grayson/Whitter version, which as you can see above is very different. Warner and Profitt of course sued Guard and got the rights and the money back in 1961.

I've always thought that it is indeed a great, great song. The two hallmark aspects of the Trio's version, I always thought, were Buzz Wheeler's great bass work and the arrangement that gives Nick Reynolds that soaring "Hang down your head and cry" line following the second verse. It was also a statement song, even if initially the KT did not intend it to be so and it took the DJ at KLUB to make it so. But a statement it became, the Trio saying we are here, we are really good, and we are going to be different from anything you've ever heard before.

And they have been. And are. And because of Tom Dooley, the breakthrough mega-hit whose sales no other Trio recording ever equaled, they have enthralled us for fifty years.

John Stewart, 1939-2008

2008-01-20T09:15:00.000-08:00

The sad news from San Diego yesterday morning was that singer-songwriter John Stewart, formerly of the Kingston Trio in its glory years, died this morning following complications resulting from a stroke Thursday night. He was 68.

Stewart was an under-appreciated artist who penned some of the best folk-style songs of the last fifty years, as well as a small number of pop/rock classics, the most notable being Daydream Believer.

Following is a remembrance penned by Stewart's best friend, Detroit journalist Tom DeLisle.

"My friend John Stewart died this morning in San Diego, California ... in the
hospital he was born in on September 5th, 1939 ... 68 years ago.

John suffered a massive stroke or brain aneurysm early Friday morning in San
Diego. Doctors had determined that any difficult surgical remedies that might
have been employed to save his life-- even if successful -- would had left
John immobile and unable to speak. It wasn't generally known, but doctors had
told John in recent years that he had apparently experienced various minor
strokes, likely in his sleep.

In the early 1970s, Stewart wrote "Cooler Water, Higher Ground," one of his
many highly personalized songs, in which he sang "I was born in the heat of
September, and I died in the cool of the fall ... borning and dying we do all the
time, it don't mean much of nothing at all." But his passing will mean so
much, to so many, around the world.

John's all-time companion and wife Buffy, and his children -- Mikael, Jeremy,
Amy, and Luke -- were at his side when he passed peacefully around 7:30 a.m.
Pacific time. John never regained consciousness after collapsing in his hotel
room late Thursday/early Friday, and was not in pain during his time at
Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego.

John Stewart leaves a compilation of musical excellence unparalleled in his
time. He recorded over 45 solo albums following his seven years in the
Kingston Trio, 1961-67. He worked all the way up to the time of his death, having
recently completed his latest as-yet untitled album. It is estimated that he
wrote more than 600 unique and highly personal songs, many of them constituting
a modern musical history of his beloved America.

He leaves behind a wide-ranging group of fans who have felt a passion for him
and his music that bordered on fanaticism. Chief among them are the
Bloodliners, a hard-core legion of supporters who communicated via computer everyday
in discussing John and his career.

It can now be said that John was told last summer, shortly before Trio
Fantasy Camp 8, that he was suffering from the initial stages of Alzheimer's
disease. That news was kept from the public in the hope that his condition would
stabilize and allow him to work in the following years until the disease took its
eventual toll. Indeed he had stabilized in the time since Camp, and was able
to bravely perform several concert shows and do the studio work on his new
album.

If there is a blessing in his passing, it is that he will now be spared the
true ravages of that awful disease. He will not suffer the gradual personal
mental reductions caused by Alzheimer's, though he had already lost his ability
to drive, owing to California law. In fact, one of the new songs on the
upcoming album is "I Can't Drive Anymore," a typically honest and emotional
personal reaction to his situation.

Speaking personally, losing John creates a hole in my soul. I had agonized
for months over the Alzheimer's prognosis. But after talking with many of his
friends and family yesterday, I can see that -- facing a debilitating future
-- it was -- and this is so hard to say --the right time for him to go. This
is what he would have wanted, in light of what he ultimately faced.

Johnny always drew a crowd, and there was a gathering of friends at the
hospital in San Diego over the past two days. Starting with Nick Reynolds from
John's Trio days and his wife Leslie, John's entire family had been joined at his
bedside by longtime sidekick Dave "Dave" Batti, John Hoke, Chuck McDermott,
Greg Jorgenson, John's boyhood best friend George Yanok, who flew in from
Nashville upon hearing the news, and other family, friends, and acquaintances. A
kind of "Irish wake" was held throughout Friday and into early Saturday, with
the friends and old bandmates sharing many of the limitless John Stewart
stories.

No plans have been announced yet for any memorial observations. I'll let you
know as soon as Buffy decides.

I'm so sorry to have to write this, to have to tell you this. Outside my
closest family members, John was the brightest light of my life. This creates an
emptiness that can never be filled. If you are tempted to mourn to great
lengths today, as so many of us surely are, we have to remind ourselves of what a
gift he was for all of us. And how lucky we all were to have had the
opportunity to have shared in his amazing music and stage artistry. We might, each
of us, have missed him, you know. But--lucky for us--we didn't.

He hated moping around, and looked for the bright side, and laughter, in
everything. He wouldn't even allow me to be 'down' about having cancer. He even
berated me at one point about it. He had amazing drive, and a creative force
within him that was stunning in its intensity and breadth. And some day his
amazing personal songs will be discovered by a mass audience, and the world at
large, and he will receive the wide-ranging accolades he was denied in his
time.

Trust me. Think about him today, listen to that incredible body of his work,
think about the electric personality we experienced in EVERY show he did ...
in the literally thousands and thousands of performances in which he gave us
everything he had, stretching from venues big and small, from coast to coast,
from 1957 to 2007. You will smile when you do; and eventually laugh when
recalling the magic of his art and personality. We will not see his like again,
but we have been so lucky to have shared him across the decades -- and found
each other through him, because of him. It does not feel like it, but we are
the lucky ones today. That will become evident in the time to come.

Because, like you ... I loved him too.

Tom DeLisle"

The Sad Tale Of "Wimoweh"

2007-06-06T13:21:00.000-07:00

One of our local PBS stations here in Los Angeles recently re-ran a program on its "Independent Lens" series entitled simply "Mbube," the Zulu word that was the only lyric in the original chant that became Anglicized (by Pete Seeger, no less) as "Wimoweh."

I had had doubts that the topic could sustain an hour's worth of television; I was wrong. PBS had done earlier hours on "This Land Is Your Land" (one of the highlights being Bruce Springsteen singing it solo with guitar) and "Danny Boy" (less successful) that had worked moderately well. But the show on "Mbube" was riveting. During the course of the hour, maybe 12 or 15 versions from Africa were played, ranging from an almost mournful dirge by the composer's daughters (more on that upcoming) to melodic versions by church groups to a vocally stunning rendition by Ladysmith Black Mazambo (of Simon's "Graceland" fame, if anyone's forgotten).

The song was indeed a traditional Zulu chant, though according to Joseph Shabalala of LBM, not a hunting chant, as is often alleged. Shabalala believes it was a "tribute" song to someone's majesty, and I have read elsewhere that the song arose in the mid nineteenth century as a tribute to Shaka, the Zulu king who devised their system of warfare, established an empire, and handed the British one of the worst military disasters that their colonial armies ever suffered - a kind of a Custer's Last Stand multiplied by about fifteen times. Shaka was known, not surprisingly, as "The Lion."

The version we hear was codified by Solomon Nisitele, also known as Solomon Linda (above). On the show, Shabalala pointed out that Linda made a daring, even shocking, change to the performance of the song. The falsetto "verse" was originally a "ululation" - the curdling cry most often heard in the West as intoned by Arab women in celebration or encouragement but apparently common throughout Africa. This "verse" was done in a singing style that before Linda's version was done only by women. For a man to sing the part was revolutionary - part of what Shabalala guesses was the "tribute" factor - to the audience, or the Zulu king, or God.

The song came to America from Linda's record company, Gallo of South Africa, a subsidiary of Decca - which was recording The Weavers. It was Seeger who picked out the song out of a couple dozen on records given him by legendary folklorist and song collector Alan Lomax, and Seeger who pronounced "mbube" (very soft first "b") as "uwimoweh." The Weavers recorded it and included it on "The Weavers At Carneige Hall," and it became a moderately successful single, reaching the Hit Parade Top Forty.

The source for most of the remaining American pop iterations of the song was the first "live" album in 1958 of the then-phenomenally popular (if today often neglected) Kingston Trio, recorded at San Francisco's legendary showcase nightclub, "The Hungry i." Except for a slightly sophomoric and lightly amusing introduction, the Trio's reading of the song is pretty straightforward and respectful of the original, delivered with their trademark verve and energy

On "At The Hungry i" the Trio attributes the song to both The Weavers and Linda, and the song was covered a really surprising number of times by other performers.

(A partial list: Ian Cowley's List )

The problem that arose then and persists to this day is one as contemporary as tomorrow's newspaper - the use and ownership of intellectual property, a bone of sharp contention between especially the US and China, where literally millions of counterfeited CDs and DVDs of mostly American songs and films find their way into international markets from pirate copiers in China, not to mention the recording industry's near-hysterical attack on Napster and Viacom's recent suit against YouTube.

Black musicians were not at the time (Linda wrote the song in 1939) permitted to receive royalties, all of which went to the record company initially (Gallo). Linda received a few dollars for a song that has sold millions of copies in different versions world wide. According to Seeger on the show (a sheepish Seeger who did not remember whether or not The Weavers ever sent Linda any money when their version became successful), George David Weiss , who wrote the "lyric" "In the jungle, the quiet (or mighty) jungle, the lion sleeps tonight," owns the copyright and has claimed to have "written" the song. Seeger related that a US copyright court case determined that if those words were sung, Weiss gets the royalties; if only the melody is heard, the Weavers do. Solomon Linda and heirs - zilch.

The poignant aspect of it was that The Tokens' familiar million seller peaked in 1961; Linda, an accomplished career musician, died in utter poverty in Soweto in 1962. His three surviving daughters live in Soweto; they have recently won international copyright approval for the song, though both George Weiss and Disney are fighting it.

By contrast, the Kingston Trio's attribution of the song in part to Linda (and the fact that "At The Hungry i" achieved platinum status, selling more than half a million copies - an incredible number for an LP in those days) apparently secured at least a small amount of money for the composer through the auspices of his record company, to whom the money apparently was paid.

So it's all the more distressing that their "do right" attribution to Linda never made him any significant amount of money - money that might have extended his and his sick daughter's lives.

It's a sad and all too familiar and all too contemporary story. If "Mbube" appears on PBS again in your area, I'd say it's worth a look, if only just to hear the music.

All Good Things....

2006-08-01T11:07:00.001-07:00

The Vivid Air has been on an unplanned and unannounced hiatus for most of this summer so far, which to the shock and consternation of well bred and educated people everywhere has actually been noted by a select few in the blogosphere (possibly including refugees from brother Rick's Right Wing Nuthouse.com, whose site meter climbs steadily toward one million visitors).

Before the sabbatical ends, I'd like to present some links to the web work that has occupied much of my time this summer.

The last few years have seen a rebirth of the amateur performing career that I had put on a much longer hiatus some decades ago. Abetted by the free resources afforded by the web (including blogspot.com and YouTube), I've been at work promoting both my group and an upcoming event that we appear at yearly.

The group is called The Chilly Winds, taking its name from a song by balladeer John Stewart, who co-wrote the song (with the late John Phillips, founder of folk-rock icons The Mams and the Papas) when he was a member of the Kingston Trio. Stewart has enjoyed a rich and critically acclaimed solo career, having released over forty solo albums and CDs, but has had only a few limited brushes with widespread commercial success. Stewart continues to soldier on, however, his releases always garnering critical enthusiasm and occasional Grammy nominations. (Stewart's most recent effort, The Day The River Sang on Appleseed Records, has been hailed as one of the best folk albums of the year to date. It is available through many sites, including Amazon).

The Chilly Winds group performs the music of the pop-folk revival of the late Fifties through mid-Sixties (also know to purists with a sense of irony as The Great Folk Scare). It's just for fun and for the joy of making music in an ensemble, as I hope our home page demonstrates:

The Chilly Winds Home Page

The links on that page to the performance videos are also accessible directly through YouTube at:

Chilly Winds Videos

Our next performance will be at a delightful folk festival outside of Colorado Springs in late August, for which I've designed this home page:

The Mountain Music Festival Home Page

We'll be moving in pretty heady company. Bob Haworth, Michael Johnson, and Mark Pearson are all long-established professionals in this branch of the folk world, as the audio and video files attest.

But I actually can chew gum and walk simultaneously, and as the eclectic nature of Moran minds is always in evidence (as with brother Terry moving from attack drones in Iraq controlled from Nevada to an interview with Kiera Knightley on Nightline, or Rick posting about the Middle East one day and Gettysburg, Custer, or the Chicago White Sox the next), I expect that my rants and ruminations on other topics will return to the blogosphere shortly. How ever has it survived without them? (insert smiley here, for those who need them.)

Coulter Pulls A Churchill

2006-06-07T22:44:00.000-07:00

OF COURSE, THESE IMAGES are reversed, aren't they? Shouldn't Ann Coulter be somewhere to the right of this column, and oughtn't Ward Churchill be on the left? Isn't that the conventional take on the "politics" of these, uh, commentators, for want of a more appropriate but less neutral term?

If it's amusing to any degree to see them on the same page, albeit in apparently inappropriate locations, then consider how much funnier it is to realize that the dyspeptic ramblings of each have come to embody all the sins of their respective extreme sides of what passes for discourse in our benighted land these days - to embody those sins at least to their opposite wavelengths on the political spectrum.

Where they both really belong, of course, is in the middle - of this page, of pointless controversey, of tasteless extremism, and perhaps most culpably, of the subversion of genuine debate in our political process by obscuring legitimate points of contention with the killer fog of screed.

Coulter, as we all know, has once again sampled the refined taste of perfectly sauteed shoe leather with her widely-publicized comments on the interior emotional lives of the September 11th widows. While the statements themselves have been widely circulated, including the most inflammatory of them here serves as a pleasant caption to the picture above and as a point of reference later on:

“These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9-11 was an attack on our nation and acted like as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was part of the closure process.
“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.”

There is more, naturally, of much the same stripe. But this suffices as an example of Coulter's off-handed and utterly purposeless meanness of spirit - the fraternal twin of, say, an observation like:

"As to those in the World Trade Center . . .

Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it. "

This is Ward Churchill, of course, in his most famous comment on the attacks of 9/11. Points of odious comparison abound here - niceties of tone and style, obviously, but logical fallacies and really poor articulation as well.

What is easy to miss, however, is just how identical in their damage the two passages are, not simply to the victims of these diatribes but sadly even more importantly to political discussion in this nation in general. Fearful partisan fighters of the extreme right and left, embedded in the impregnable bunkers of their own certitude, look to their prophets here quoted as validators of their own suffering at the hands of their hate-filled foes. Blasts of criticism at the heartless and anti-intellectual nature of both Coulter's and Churchill's rants from those of more sober and stable mind become transformed in the minds of the True Believers as yet further evidence of a Vast (choose "Right" or "Left" here) Wing Conspiracy against all that is good and holy in America and in fact the whole damned universe.

Sadly, though, embedded in each of these compost piles are legitimate ideas worthy of much more pointed and rational discussion. To what extent have the victims of the terrorist attacks both living and dead become pawns and icons in somebody else's political games? That is a legitimate question to ask, irrespective of who those victims are. But the question can be addressed with a dignity and decency foreign not only to this tirade from Coulter but that is decidedly absent from most everything she writes.

And Churchill's tastelessness doesn't have even the partially mitigating grace of originality. He was simply defrosting and reheating the far more complex questions raised by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Study In The Banality of Evil of the extent of personal resposibility that individuals bear in the destructive acts that a nation perpetrates. Arendt's articulated point was that the face of evil was not the mustachioed madman or the corpulent Luftwaffe Reichsmarschall or even the skinny Gauleiter for propaganda but rather the faceless, bespectacled bureaucrat who never killed anyone, loved his wife and family, and held down a solid nine-to-five office job. But in that office, Adolf Eichmann planned train schedules, secured barbed wire, and ordered Zyklon-B poison gas, all for ends that he never witnessed nor apparently thought about very much. And Arendt's implication casts a much broader net to include the railroad employees and contractors and construction workers who never once committed direct acts of violence against Jews but without whose mute complicity the Holocaust could never have come into its apocalyptic reality.

Ward Churchill tries to apply an absurdly over-simplified version of Arendt's subtle and complex questions to the actions of the post-1990 American imperium. That Churchill cannot fathom the difference between Hitler's Germany and Bush's USA is indictment enough of his venal stupidity. But the very indecency of his attack all but eviscerates the possibility of asking hard questions about the effect on the poor of the developing world of the profit-motivated and U.S.-led forces of globalization powered by the overpowering engine of the American economy. Those questions deserve to be asked and discussed and debated - they are as old as "Am I my brother's keeper?" - and not to be spewed up from the sewer-mind of a man so steeped in self-loathing that he cannot be honest even with himself about who he is.

Coulter and Churchill serve the same masters and worship at the same shrines, apparent differences notwithstanding. Both butcher the language - "little Eichmanns" for stockbrokers and secretaries? "broads" - and from a woman, at that? - and both disrespect the logic of genuine political discourse. They both have deified their own egos, and their hymns are the discordant noises of their own rhetoric. Neither is really "liberal" or"conservative" in whatever integrity these terms have retained in the face of concerted assaults from the intellectual flatulence of their ilk. Their insensitive and indefensible extremism places them in exactly the same place: in the dead center of the outermost fringe of commentary in America, and oddly and hilariously in the same intellectual bed with each other.

The Real American Idol: Pete Seeger

2006-05-13T22:53:00.000-07:00

CHILDREN EIGHTY YEARS YOUNGER THAN HE IS can sing his songs. Folk musicians around the world play an instrument that bears his name. An American rock icon releases a tribute album to coincide with his eighty-seventh birthday. The Kennedy Center honors him for lifetime achievement in the same city that nearly jailed him for subversion decades earlier. A fundamentally simple man, he wears his accolades with a frank and modest demeanor that puts literally to shame the self-aggrandizing, chest-thumping atonal frauds and mass production empty vessels who are called musicians today. He is both the first and last of a breed of whose creation he was a major part. He is an American original. He is Pete Seeger.

There is a hint of the timeless about the man. He never looked young, even when he was, and now that he is well into his ninth decade, he wears his age with the same grace that he held and played that now-famous long-necked banjo. Seeger has godfathered three younger generations of musicians, and nothing lends credibility to a folksinger as much as an association with ol' Pete does. He has spent nearly seventy years singing songs, through decades of wars and depression and peace and prosperity, always with an unarticulated faith that if he could just get folks singing together then somehow things would work out for the best. From his wanderings with Woody Guthrie to union rallies and migrant camps and with the Almanac Singers and the Weavers through their rise and fall - from pressing Bob Dylan and Joan Baez into freedom rides and demonstrations in the Deep South in the Civil Rights era through his cruises up and down the Hudson with Arlo Guthrie to cleanse that desecrated waterway - Pete Seeger has just kept on singing, and he wanted all of us to sing along with him.

A half dozen at least of his songs will likely outlive him by a century or more. While everyone knows that Pete wrote Where Have All The Flowers Gone? and Turn! Turn! Turn! and co-wrote If I Had A Hammer with fellow Weaver Lee Hays, few are aware that folk classics Guantamera and Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight) would have lain fallow in their countries of origin had not Seeger discovered, re-arranged, and introduced them to American audiences. Fewer still are aware that the present form of We Shall Overcome, originally a religious and labor song before it became a civil rights hymn and just about every activist's favorite anthem, owes its arrangement and many of its lyrics to the lanky Harvard drop-out with that impossibly long banjo.

That Seeger's supposed politics remain problematic for some is simply an indication of the extent to which Pete subsumed himself into his music. Not given to rants, Pete always tried to let the songs speak for him. That he was a socialist or communist or radical leftist is beyond question. But HUAC and McCarthy and the FBI never quite understood what Pete was up to. Seeger's activism had more in common with the utopian communards of nineteenth century New Harmony or Brook Farm than it ever did with sleeper cells or comic-opera type Commies who drummed out the vote for Gus Hall for forty years. If you want to understand Pete's collectivism, you have to look not in Trotsky or Lenin but in Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes! or Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Like those classic American poets, Pete Seeger had an unshakable belief in the uncommonness of the Common Man, in the ultimate destiny that the rights of the many would prevail over the privileges of the few. You can see the Seeger brand of social collectivism more accurately in an Amish barn-raising than you can in a screed from any of today's misnamed "leftists."

All you have to do is just listen to him sing. His voice is sweet without being especially refined or trained; it has a throatiness and flatness of accent that brands it as unmistakably and universally American. It reminds you of the delightful and classic short story The Devil and Daniel Webster in which Stephen Vincent Benet relates the tale of an unfortunate New Hampshire farmer who in a moment of weakness has sold his soul to the Devil himself. In an effort to stay out of Hell, the farmer implores the legendary Daniel Webster to plead his case for him. Things seem to be going badly until Webster reaches his summation. Benet tells us

...he wasn't pleading for any one person any more, though his voice rang like an organ. He was telling the story and the failures and the endless journey of mankind. They got tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was a great journey....The fire began to die on the hearth and the wind before morning to blow.... And his words came back at the end .... For his voice could search the heart, and that was his gift and his strength. And to one, his voice was like the forest and its secrecy, and to another like the sea and the storms of the sea; and one heard the cry of his lost nation in it, and another saw a little harmless scene he hadn't remembered for years. But each saw something.

And that is what Pete Seeger has been doing for the last seventy years - he has been bringing us back to ourselves, by teaching us the songs that are our birthright - the birthright we have sold for a mess of pop-idol pottage. When Pete couldn't find a song to say what he was thinking, well, he'd just up and write one, and in a hundred years no one is likely to be able to tell the difference. That's because Pete Seeger is what many aspire to be and no one can become by trying: a genuine legend in his own time. In him, singer and song unite to become one sublime and very American and truly iconic presence. We are surely not likely to see his equal again.

Justice, Not Vengeance

2006-05-03T21:52:00.000-07:00

That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.
- Justice Robert H. Jackson, American Prosecutor, Nuremberg

Supreme Court Justice Jackson's words come echoing back across the decades today as a jury in Alexandria, Virginia chose to exercise its reason and the rule of law in making its binding recommendation that Zacarias Moussaoui be sentenced to life in prison rather than death.

The jury's action is not likely to be popular, and at first glance its reasoning seems muddy. Moussaoui knew of the plans for the attacks and contributed to destruction and mayhem of September 11th, asserted the jury, but was mysteriously somehow not responsible enough for the 3,000 deaths to warrant execution. The jury's refusal to condemn Moussaoui to death in this phase of the trial is based upon sometimes confused and even conflicting rationales of "mitigation." He is guilty, in other words, - but not guilty enough.

Initially, perhaps, the finding seems wrong. It feels wrong. Moussaoui is an admitted terrorist, member of Al-Qaeda, and conspirator in the fiery holocausts in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Surely no defendant since Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City infamy is more deserving of American justice's supreme penalty.

Yet the Virginia jury's decision, however muddled its rationale, may well be the most defensible one - and one that, like the Nuremberg trials extolled by Jackson, may well reflect more positively to posterity on the innate sense of justice on which we pride ourselves in this country than the easier and more widely (one might say hungrily) anticipated condemnation to execution.

Consider Nuremberg for a moment. The perspective of sixty years makes it seem a logical if somewhat problematic decision. The Allies had in their control scores of men who had perpetrated the largest mass murders in the history of the world and who had unleashed the greatest cataclysm of destruction and death that the world has ever known. The question of what to do with the Nazi leaders did not have a clear answer. Certainly, victors in past wars had punished their enemies, sometimes with humiliation and death, as the ancient Romans had, or with the kind of political and economic revenge exacted under the Treaty of Versailles by these same victors upon these same vanquished.

But the Nazi atrocities were a different matter altogether, and no one course of action seemingly could satisfy the competing demands of justice for the war's innocent victims with the avoidance of the appearance of "victor's justice" in a Soviet-style show trial. Some elements in the U.S. departments of War and State favored military tribunals, which were eventually employed in many of the 1,600 cases of less highly-placed officials of the Third Reich. The French expressed interest in Napoleonic Code-styled "courts of inquisition," and a significant element within the Russian government and military favored summary execution, perhaps understandably given that nation's 20 million dead.

The United States, however, with plans already in place from Roosevelt cabinet members Henry Morgenthau and Henry L. Stimson and impelled by the commitment of Harry Truman to an "American" sense of justice, pushed for and won approval for the trials, even over the initial objections of Winston Churchill.

The Nuremberg Trials were clearly and obviously not exercises in pure justice, and they had their critics on that basis even within the U.S., most notably that icon of true American conservatism, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Taft objected to the proceedings on grounds both practical and moral. The trials, he maintained, could never fulfill their objective of preventing future aggression because in his words "no one makes aggressive war unless he expects to win."
Worse, contended Taft, the trials were in opposition to a "fundamental principle of American law that a man cannot be tried under an ex post facto statute." Further, some American military leaders were uneasy with the precedent that Nuremberg seemed to be setting - a precedent that shadows foreign policy decisions in the U.S. to this day, at least as far as participation in the World Court is concerned.

It took the perspective of a man like Justice Jackson to make the enterprise succeed to whatever extent it did. Jackson's energetic and passionate prosecution was conducted strictly within limits of evidence and testimony that he felt history would unquestionably judge as right-minded and fair. That Jackson could prove beyond the shadow of any doubt the guilt of men like Goering, von Ribbentrop, and Streicher seems more inevitable now than it actually was.

Part of the claim that the Nuremberg Court ultimately did the right thing rests with the decisions it handed down that bear a striking resemblance to the Moussaoui verdict. Of the initial 24 defendants, all of them key figures in the Third Reich, several were acquitted outright and others sentenced to as little as ten years imprisonment. And despite the subsequent partial exoneration of Admiral Doenitz and General Jodl, a sense that right had been done and justice administered pervaded much of the post-Nuremberg world - quickly more preoccupied as it was with the intensifying conflict between the Americans and Soviets.

The principle that emerges from Nuremberg, however flawed and problematic the proceedings may seem today, is that justice must trump vengeance - or we all become moral descendants of the Nazis, exercising might without morality and justifying it with the same sense of exceptionalism that gave us the Third Reich and the Master Race.

The jury in Alexandria refused to do that. As former federal prosecutor Joshua Berman asserted on the PBS News Hour, "What the government ultimately argued was a lie should be punished by death, and that's highly unusual in our system and virtually unheard of." Whatever Moussaoui may have wanted to do and however evil he may have wanted to be, what he actually did was lie - and that crime, however serious, is not punishable by death in any of the fifty states nor in any federal statute.

As emotionally satisfying, then, as many might find the execution of Moussaoui, it simply would be incompatible with anything like a truly American sense of justice. In refusing to kill this pathetic fanatic under color of legality but under motivation of revenge, we remind ourselves and assert to the world just how completely unlike him we are. He comes at us with murderous intent; we respond to him with a dispassionate sense of proportion and fairness, one that Justice Robert Jackson would understand and commend.

No Lightweights

2006-05-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

The Original Kingston Trio

For a group that was alleged to have been so determinedly and conscientiously apolitical for much of the first ten years of its existence, the Kingston Trio in fact managed to make its share of social comment, albeit in a primarily entertaining and highly polished manner - too polished, had you asked the Eastern urban folk "establishment" of the early 60s.

But from the first, the Trio had things to say. Even with its rehearsed and harmonic arrangements, the first eponymous album manages to include the kind of "working class hero" style of folk songs that the group had adapted from the Weavers' extensive repertoire of the same - songs like Saro Jane, Santy Anno, and even Sloop John B. The sly humor of songs like Three Jolly Coachmen and Banua also provided wry commentary on the social mores of the era.

Many of the succeeding albums continued the trend in some fashion or other. MTA is so delightfully a fun song to hear or sing that it's easy to overlook its original political intent, a sort of foreshadowing of the tax revolts and anti-government sentiments that swept the country decades later. As romantic and lovely as San Miguel may be, there is a definite comment on class and race in the song. The very selections on the Christmas album and the Trio's proclivity for singing in Spanish, Zulu, and Polynesian tongues made them (as has been observed here before) in many ways the first true exponents of "world music" - by itself a powerful and political statement.

The later arrival of John Stewart and the consequent inclusion of songs of commentary both literal and implied on most of the albums of that era - and the very dedication of New Frontier and the entire Time To Think venture - clearly did not spring from a vacuum but rather represented a logical progression of the group's approach.

Now it would be silly to suggest that the KT was trying to do what Peter, Paul and Mary were doing from the outset, or what the Chad Mitchell Trio made its stock in trade. But the Kingston Trio had a lot more to say in its song selection than is generally credited to it, and nowhere is this demonstrated more effectively than in its continuing use of Woody Guthrie's compositions. Hard Travelin' is one of Guthrie's Dust Bowl ballads and a good representation of the worker as hero songs (check out the full lyric: http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Hard_Travelin.htm). And the inclusion of two of Guthrie's more overt political statement songs on one album - "Goin' Places" - is truly remarkable. As most fans of the song know, This Land Is Your Land was Woody G.'s angry response to what he regarded as the fatuous jingoism of Irving Berlin's God Bless America. And if the Trio edited out some of the more inflammatory lyrics, no amount of editing can disguise the basic populism of the song.

More remarkable, I think, is the Kingston's inclusion of Pastures of Plenty on that album and later Deportee on Time To Think- both songs making a direct and unsparing commentary on the issues at the head of the news reports today. Though most of the migrants in the former song were in Guthrie's day Okies and other dispossessed farmers of the Steinbeck genre, the Trio's version appeared in the wake of Edward R. Murrow's classic documentary "Harvest of Shame," in which the plight of the exploited braceros of the day was examined in detail. That put a different spin on Woody's words:

"California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well its North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine

Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground
From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters run down
Every state in the Union us migrants have been
We'll work in this fight and we'll fight till we win."

And no different spin is necessary at all on Deportee - the final verse as the Trio sang it is as direct as commentary gets:

"Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?

Now I wouldn't assert nor presume to comment on the relationship of all of this to whatever political position anyone espouses today on the topic of immigration. The events of today, however - and hearing the phenomenal voice of Cisco Houston singing what I think is the second-best version of Deportee on record - simply reminded me of something that Milt Okun wrote about John Denver following Denver's tragic death. With apologies to Okun, I paraphrase: I knew the Kingston Trio. I know their music. They were no lightweights.

(This piece appeared in slightly different form at The Kingston Trio Place.)

The Only Bridge

2006-04-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

Any restless ghost wandering in the vicinity of Evergreen Cemetery on a gray and chill November Saturday a few weeks back might well have been mildly intrigued by the sight of ten rather mature people gathered over an unremarkable head stone - unremarkable at least until a closer inspection revealed the unusual length and literary source of its inscription - from Thornton Wilder:

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Perhaps it would have been as bemused by the books held so reverently by the celebrants as it likely would have been startled by the presence of a guitar in their midst. Or maybe, if Wilder's symbolic Third Act in Our Town is in any way prescient, it simply joined its waiting and ever-present fellows on that ground, brought back into contact with Us the Living by a three hundred year old folk song about a boy, a ship, a girl, and mean and duplicitous father. Odd choice for a memorial, those spirits might have thought. How little would they - could they - have understood what was so exactly right about it.

In the eleven years since Glen Lake Songs was recorded, I have often reflected on just how central to our childhood experience as a family that songs like The Golden Vanity were, and how accidental it was that this should have been so. After all, our parents grew up in and had an enduring love for the music of the Big Band Era, and one of the delights of their own middle age was regular visits to Orchestra Hall for the Chicago Symphony. Folk music both traditional and popularized came in by the back door, really by way of a single recording that Daddy had heard somewhere and that Mother had loved about a Boston commuter trapped eternally on a train for lack of a nickel.

Belafonte had already made his debut in the parental record collection, but the albums of first the Kingston Trio and then the Vanguard collection Folks Songs and Minstrelsy, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Weavers and many others followed rapidly and regularly, this because in addition to their own enjoyment of the music one of the primary tenets of their parenting was to find and feed whatever intellectual and creative interests their many children were developing - as the presence of an out-of-tune black upright piano and a nearly complete collection of Chip Hilton books in the study in the Barrington Hills house gave silent witness to for decades.

The next step, one by no means inevitable, was Daddy's gift of a Silvertone guitar to me for my thirteenth birthday. Both parents were hesitant to do this because they didn't want me to give up the piano. But when that did in fact happen, there were no recriminations; instead - a better guitar some ten months later for Peggy and me singing Greenland Whale Fisheries and Cane on the Brazos for the 1964 St. Viator Variety Show and a long neck banjo shortly after that. Music at Glen Lake and family assemblings over the years, The Richland Trio, Guernsey and Moran, a booking as the warm-up act for John Denver, decades playing for friends and students - all of this grew from that single act of open-mindedness and generosity.

So when I first read in 2000 of the fantasy camp premiering that year in Arizona sponsored by John Stewart and Nick Reynolds of the old Kingston Trio - the climax of which was an appearance on stage with them for a single song as the third member of the band - I realized simultaneously what a silly idea it was and how completely irresistible it would be for me. What tipped me in favor of going in 2003 were the fact that Reynolds had just turned 70 (leading me to face how upset I would be were I to miss this chance, however silly) and that a video of the "fantasy trio" performance was part of the deal. Both considerations validated themselves in my actual participation in the Camp in 2003 and 2004.

There was something about stepping onto that stage with two visibly tired older men that closed a circle for me, or that represented as much of a climax in a major element of my life as wading in the Beaufort Sea did for another. It was as far as I could go, and farther than I had ever dreamed possible.

The notes and words of The Golden Vanity and The Parting Glass, wafting as they did with the appropriate gusto and melancholy over that chilly and still cemetery, may well have provided some comfort to the unperturbed spirits of our parents, who hovered over and with us there as they had in life. I had always hoped as a boy that they enjoyed our singing. That November day, I'm sure they did.

The Public Voice

2006-04-24T23:18:00.001-07:00

We may never fully escape the long shadows cast by the attacks of September 11th. We are reminded on a nearly daily basis: Congressional hearings, the Moussaoui trial, the ongoing debates, conspiracy theories, TV ads beginning for the soon-to-be-released film "United 93" - even brother Rick over at the Right Wing Nuthouse posting an essay a couple of days ago entitled "Are You 'Over' 9/11 Yet?"

One possible reason for the ongoing trauma, beyond the obvious shock of the event itself and the consequent sense of uneasy vulnerability that it engendered nationwide, is that we have not yet had - and may never have - the kind of conclusive national catharsis that such a tragedy seems to demand.

Other catastrophes have had the finality of graceful denoument - the triumphant march of the Grand Army of the Republic through the streets of Washington in May of 1865, or the surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri, or the horse-drawn caisson and riderless horse and solemnly muffled drums of November , 1963. Such observances function as transitions, as portals through which we pass and lines of demarcation between what was and what is to be.

That we have no such moment of closure for the attacks on New York and Washington is not for lack of trying. Books have been written, documentaries produced, hearings held - all attempts to come to terms with what happened and why.

But all such attempts have failed, largely, I think, because we have no one bold enough to speak with the kind of public voice that artists in general and poets in particular in earlier times considered both their right and their obligation to employ. The disdain, for example, that independent-minded poets have frequently expressed for one of their own who accepts a laureate position - the position of becoming the official literary mouth of a government, a kind of artistic press secretary - stands in stark contrast to the Wordsworth or Browning or Whitman or Sandburg or Frost who treasured their critical independence yet dared to speak about the great issues of their days with a voice that was at one and the same time intensely personal and unapologetically public.

Maybe the last poet to do so sucessfully, and arguably more successfully than any other writer in English of the twentieth century, was W.H. Auden. It is no coincidence, then, that in the groping for meaning following the catastrophe of five years ago it was Auden's words that appeared ubiquitously, especially the closing lines from one of his finest poems, "September 1, 1939":

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

This is vintage Auden - the poet's voice at its finest, conflating the public disaster of the outbreak of the Second World War with his own sense of "negation and despair" - the public event and the private angst-filled horror conjoined in a single remarkable work of art.

That Auden in his more conservative later years repudiated the poem and sought to ban its inclusion in his collected works is unsurprising. Barely thirty when he composed it, Auden came to regard it as the effluvium of his youthful romance with socialism and as (in his own words) "intellectually dishonest." He had grown past and out of the passions that informed the first stages of his artistic life, and he sought to bury some of what endure as his greatest poems, including the elegy to Yeats and "Petition," among many others.

If our age and the events of September 11, 2001 have not produced a voice like Auden's, perhaps it is because we do not have the ears with which to hear it. This very poem exemplifies that fact. As much as these closing lines served for many as a kind of comfort - the voice of the solitary powerless individual confronting and seeking to deal with cataclysm - the whole poem itself conveys a very different set of observations. Auden sees the impending world war not as an attack on innocence but rather as the logical and inevitable outcome of mistakes and mendacity. Earlier in the poem, he notes:

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

The "psychopathic god" that Hitler had made of himself, in other words, was spawned as much by Versailles as it was by any other single factor. And Auden had little sympathy for the machinery of capitalism or the modern industrialized Western state. He opens the poem by locating himself ironically in New York, in "one of the dives/On Fifty Second street." His observation on the skyline of the city that was to be so violated sixty-two years later:

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Horrors have their reasons to Auden, and nothing happens in stasis or vacuum. As ye sow, so also shall ye reap. That is Auden's take on why the awfulness was to come upon them, the evil and the innocent alike - more akin in some ways to the ill-phrased and mean-spirited obscenities of Ward Churchill than to the uses to which some have tried to put Auden's poem.

Which is not to suggest the Auden is obscene, or that he blames the innocent. It is in fact for him the very innocence of the victims of international horrors in whatever decade that stokes his anger against "Collective Man" or, as he suggests later, "Authority":

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

These are the lines that I believe Auden himself might have cited after September 11th. The imperative of the last line, coming as it does immediately before the last stanza quoted above, is the artistic core of the poem. We must do good even to those who do or wish us evil, lest we engender greater evil in return. Likely anticipatory of his later conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, this line is not the weak-kneed response of a hand-wringing bleeding heart. It is rather the thundering testament of a Biblical prophet, one who shatters tablets on the heads of those stiff of neck and short of sight. Mend your ways, see the truth clearly, live by it - or perish. And this is what we have lacked since September 11th - a compellingly artistic assertion motivated by neither narrow politics nor reprehensible self-interest, from a poet who can believe it is within his purview and power to unfold that lie.

The Goose, The Gander, and The Sauce

2006-04-20T11:29:00.000-07:00

I had planned to restrict my political observations on this site and vent my intellectual exhaust fumes from the combustion of the world as it is with my own sense of the world as it should be on the multitude of other sites so thoughtfully provided by others in the blogosphere for just that purpose.

Now one of the most entertaining and best-written of the conservative blogs is The Rightwing Nuthouse, whose proprietor, author, researcher, editor, and general-antic-in-chief just happens to be one of my (many) brothers, the indefatigable Rick Moran, lately seen locking horns (figurative and not demonic) with lefty Taylor Marsh on C-Span's "Washington Journal." Rick acquitted himself nobly, garnering favorable reviews even from Marsh herself.

(Parenthesis: One of the two panel participants was more articulate about the global implications of the policies discussed - and it wasn't Marsh.)

Rick writes with commendable enthusiasm about Fox TV's "24," with great passion about baseball, and with generally good humor about politics from what I'd term a usually conservative (as opposed to strident right wing) perspective that is rather more oblique than opposed to my own classically liberal (as opposed to the Stalinist-politically-correct-formerly-"New Left" bastardization of progressivism current today)stances on issues. It makes for some genial conversations and, as Rick notes in his own profile, some interesting family reunions.

Rick's topic today, as the link above shows, is the unpleasantness related to a recent incident at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the subsequent reaction of Michelle Malkin, the prominent, popular, and often quoted right wing (and NOT conservative) blogger whose readership (and I'm trusting Rick on this) is in the neighborhood of 144,000.

The UCSC incident involved a small number of students harassing, blocking, and physically assaulting military recruiters on campus. From the news reports in the MSM, it certainly looks like the demonstrators' physical interference constituted some kind of crime or other, and the legal system will work that out in its own time. Definitely small potatoes compared to what was happening in a similar vein back in the Sixties, but serious enough in itself.

A number of left-oriented commentators have tried to excuse the students' conduct with the classically Stalinist ethic that the ends (interfering with the prosecution of an immoral war) justify the means (breaking the law and attempting to restrict free political speech on campus).

If the students committed crimes during their protest, then they need to go to jail. Gandhi did; King did; hell, even I did. That's the part of the civil disobedience equation that many seem to have forgotten.

What they do not deserve is to have their "personal information" posted on a website that draws the abovementioned one hundred thousand plus hits - or even on a site that draws a fraction of the same. That's just gratuitous bullying any way you slice it - and justified only by the same illogic of the Stalinists on the other side - that quelling all this nasty progressivism still floating around permits even the most un-civil of public acts.

Malkin justifies her publicizing (from public documents already easily available, to be fair to her) of students' email addresses and phone numbers by writing:

As for SAW, my message is this: You are responsible for your individual actions. Other individuals are responsible for theirs. Grow up and take responsibility.

And indeed they should - in a court of law, and not to Malkin or the reading public at large.

In retaliation against Malkin, though, a number of left-leading websites have published her home address and phone number, which would seem mere poetic justice were it not for:

a) the sad fact of the number of nuts of all and no political stripes wandering the American landscape today, and

b) another old moral saw about two wrongs not making an acceptable sum.

Brother Rick, though, sees the situation in a different light - a dimmer one, I think:

Of course, we’re now beyond the debate about what went on at UCSC and into the bloody aftermath; Malkin’s publishing the press release containing the telephone numbers of those poor, innocent college students. This is something Malkin does quite often. She publishes contact information of school principals, corporate CEO’s, college professors, local elected officials, and anyone and everyone who demonstrates either extraordinary cluelessness or a particular bias against conservatives. It is the fact that she encourages her readers to initiate contact that has lefty blogs up in arms.

http://www.rightwingnuthouse.com

Enough said right there, really. As the Jesus notes in Matthew's Gospel "All who take the sword shall perish by the sword." And of course, Hamlet does in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by figuratively hoisting them with their own petard.

Malkin encourages her readership to "initiate contact." Her opponents turn the technique on her, upping the ante by bringing it all literally closer to home.

So - sorry brother Rick, but if you play with dirt, you're going to get dirty. Or as the Anglo-Saxons put it in their own inimitably pithy way - if you lie down with pigs, you'll wake up smelling like shit.

An Invocation At The Outset

2006-04-19T23:36:00.000-07:00

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

- Stephen Spender

And thus does this new venture acquire a name, one most appropriate as Spender's words and ideas pluck at "the mystic chords of memory," as Lincoln so aptly phrased it.

What I hope to do with this isn't completely clear to me at this point. For a person widely regarded as gregarious and social, I have always been intensely private about the kinds of things that have found their ways into my sporadically-kept journals over the decades. And yet - I had considered naming this "Words in the Wind" or something of the sort - as if casting random thoughts into a cyber-universe that has by some reports over thirty million active blogs was the equivalent of singing on a deserted trail in the northern Rockies or on a remote lake in the Northwest Territories.

But if Spender is right - then the sky at least does listen, or will listen if the words like the names he celebrates are animated by a sense of honor. Writing here is the same kind of act of faith that motivated the scientists of SETI with their radio messages or of JPL with the plaque that they flung beyond the outmost bounds of the solar system.

Maybe no one will hear, maybe no one will see - but the acts themselves are an existential affirmation -

a signing of the air, if you will, with a hopeful grasp at honor.