Four Performances-Part Three: Punk Folk. Folk. Folk!

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

It took me an extra beat or two to continue this series, because I soon see myself as inappropriately going on too long about myself — this recounting influences and small events, even if personally meaningful, starts to seem out of proportion. I don’t know if there’s another way to write memoir than to engage in that “objects closer to the mirror” distortion, but I can’t help but think it’d be more appropriate if there was some greater payoff in achievement. The simple fact of the matter is that these are not stories of a performer’s early days before finding a notable level of success with audiences — more its opposite.

I’m grateful for the hundreds that might read one of these posts, for the thousands of times someone has listened to one or another of the audio pieces over the years. I try and honor your attention by being respectful of your time. I’m not so much afraid of embarrassing myself as I’m afraid of wasting your time.

A number of bands that came out of Minnesota in the Eighties did gather national attention — the scene punched above its weight — but as in most artistic or commercial activities, even a successful scene had many more failures-to-thrive than notable acts.*  This band of poets, Dave and I, wasn’t going to be one of the notables. Today’s performance was an inflection point for that.

We’d recorded our official album, which was released on cassette tape for lack of capital funds to get LPs pressed.** The local alt-weekly, The Twin Cities Reader,  reviewed it, and its cover linked us, the LYL Band, with a new record from The Time.

LYL Reviewed in Twin Cities Reader

The Time article promised on the front page teaser was a longer feature in the same issue. Great, but too forgotten too often local rock band Fine Art and their guitarist Colin Mansfield gets mentioned here too.

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As reviews go, Paul Fishman Maccabee’s “So engagingly out-of-tune and cheerily offensive: it could well become a cult item” wasn’t exactly Robert Sheldon’s “Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months,” but it allowed us a modicum of creditability. We were trying to evolve from a pair of acoustic folkies to an electric rock band (the recording was largely played on electric instruments), but we were doing that in a meandering way. A neighborhood guy, Jonathan Tesdell played electric guitar — and, we were assured, conga drums. I hoped he might become our analog to the Fugs Ken Weaver as he joined up with us.

At the time of that Reader  review we got an offer to play at the University of Minnesota. We took them up on it. We were practicing regularly now, trying to solidify our repertoire. This could be, if not our break, our foot in the door.

A small blip in our ascension dropped before the show date: the University called and asked what kind of music we should be billed as. I think Dave gave them a capsule description of our weirdness — and Dave’s an articulate guy — whatever he said it included the genre label “Punk Folk.”

That week as I walked across the never-named-that John Berryman bridge to the U, I noticed the posters along that span and on into the campus. They said “local PUNK FUNK.” Typo? Mishearing? I don’t know, but if Punk Folk wasn’t yet a common genre category in the early Eighties, Punk Funk was a term Rick James was using at this time for his work, and in the less-commercial indie scene the term was used to describe acts like James Chance’s NYC No-Wave skinny-tie-white-guy James Brown extrapolation. We were a trio expanding from acoustic instruments to electric ones without a bass player or a drummer.

Okay.

LYL Band concert poster Univerity of Minnesota Willey Hall

Photo in the poster by Renee Robbins. L to R: Dave Moore holding my tiny CasioTone that was my first synthesizer (it was also a calculator). Jonathan Tesdell, the new guy in the group and 25th Century Quaker, and Frank Hudson trying to look like he had Jazz chops, which he didn’t. Yes, our backup singers “The Cookies” did serve cookies and cider to the audience. The Replacements confounded audiences at key times in their career, but they never tried that.

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The day of the concert came. We loaded Dave’s newly purchased used Farfisa combo organ and my homemade speaker cabinet for it, Jonathan’s Firebird electric guitar and Roland amp, my sound-hole pickup 12-string acoustic and heavily modified Japanese Sixties’ electric guitar along with my Fender Princeton amp into our rattle-trap old cars. On arriving, we found the concert location was a broad stage, the width of the room in front, with audience seats for a few hundred.*** The venue had supplied a full-sized Yamaha grand piano for Dave to play. I recall it had a paper band across the keyboard, which I joked was like the “sanitized for your protection” bands on a hotel toilet.

The audience arrived, accumulating to not a full-house. My memory isn’t clear on this, perhaps just a third or a quarter of the seats. Even so, that could mean at a minimum there were 80 people there, and unlike the shows at Modern Times, most weren’t folks we knew from the neighborhood. I don’t know what Dave or Jonathan felt, but I was hoping to put on a good show, to put forward our intent: some satire and civic points, some music with the not-necessarily-perfect, but perfectly-necessary energy of the still underground indie music movement that was also called around then “College Rock.” How well would we go over with this barely-Rock, with this audience, at this college?

I was on the stage performing when my nerve started to fail. That came during the song that the audience showed the most response too: four-songs-in we played a number that I think we informally called “Booker T”  or “Memphis Thing”,  an instrumental based on a nice riff I’d come up with as something of a concession to new-member Jonathan, the non-poet who wasn’t much of a lyrics guy. I could sense the audience perking up with that piece’s groove, hopes out there in the seats that things were going to lock in for more of a Rock show. Did some of the audience come for the poster’s Punk Funk? Did they at least expect something more like the other young Twin Cities rock bands that would play the Longhorn, 7th Street Entry or Duffy’s? Whatever, I knew “No, it’s not going to lock in. We’re going to do more folk songs about social issues and weird observations from two poets.” Not being able to change that, however true the set list was to our concept, dismayed me — yet I needed to carry on, while confidence was draining away.

I recall those feelings hanging on after the concert. Rather than having stubborn pride in presenting our band and its shambling, eclectic, cabaret setlist, I felt I’d let the band down. If Dave, the better performer felt any of this, he didn’t show it, and Jonathan , as ever, was by nature a quiet, pacific guy. I remember sitting in the car after loading back out immersed in a sort of punk folk funk, and on the radio — of all things — came Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile/Slight Return.” I, the guitar-playing poet. heard him in my mood not as the obligatory guitar-great Hendrix, but as the lyricist Hendrix, the kid who’d scrawled spaceship doodles and poetry in his school-lined notebooks.

I stand up next to a mountain
And I chop it down with the edge of my hand
I pick up all the pieces and make an island
Might even raise a little sand

That’s what artists do. We are at essence pretentious, that thing we fear, that prideful sin we are sometimes called on. And the charge, that indictment, is sometimes true: we fail, or sometimes certain audiences fail, sometimes we lack conviction, sometimes we are convicted, a just verdict. Still, we think we can raise mountains, raise up islands from our imagination. Sometimes that imagination lets others climb on those mountains, take shelter on those islands — other times we fall through our dreams. When nothing is beneath our feet, are we falling or flying? Hendrix continued, singing:

I didn’t mean to take up all your sweet time
I’ll give it right back one of these days

When I took up your time today with the continuing shaggy dog story of my band of poets, I asked if it was worthwhile telling this story about a band that didn’t make much of an impact. Here’s a plausible reason: despite that outcome, I’d do it again — maybe harder next time— and the music-making with fellow poet Dave Moore continued, continues. I know some of my readers are younger and are making music or other art within a career that doesn’t yet know it’s apogee. Have courage: you’re falling or flying.

Here are two pieces from a lo-fi tape of that U of M concert in 1981: Dave’s adaptation of a poem by Kevin FitzPatrick “Bugs in the System”  and my own Surrealist summer meditation “China Mouth.”   You can hear them with the graphical audio players below, but if you don’t see those players, the highlighted titles are links that when clicked on will open a new tab with an audio player.

Here’s Dave Moore singing a tale from the front-lines  of minimum-wage, “Bugs In the System (keys to the drop safe):”   This was the second song in the 1981 concert.

And here I am singing the third song in the concert’s set list, “China Mouth”,  a song of Summer discontent. The “Memphis Thing”   groove-oriented instrumental I write about above was the next song we played.

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*An off-the-top-of-my-head Eighties Twin Cities list: Prince, The Time, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Soul Asylum, Babes in Toyland, Alexander O’Neal, The Jayhawks, Flyte Tyme (Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis, largely as important producers). And like most scenes, the above acts are a quick list of those someone elsewhere might have heard of, when there’s a list at least as long of good acts that remained at local hero status. Given the LYL Band’s penchant for satire, I could also have mentioned that the Eighties saw the Twin Cities grow a substantial comedy scene, one participant in that became our bass player for a while.

**I believe it was the first cassette-only release in the Twin Cities scene. I duplicated the cassettes myself, and Dave made the packaging for them. I got the idea from ROIR in New York City who in 1981 put out its first cassette-only release (James Chance and the Contortions). Their release and ours followed the introduction of the Sony Walkman, a small battery-powered portable cassette with headphones that was a cultural artifact of the era. I wrote a press release for our recording that exclaimed “Teach your Sony Walkman to crawl!”

***Looking online today I see there are two possible Wiley Hall rooms, one that seats just under 700 and another 362.

Four Performances-Part Two: “I love it when guns show up”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Today’s performance happened a decade later in 1981. This is a series about performances, so I’ll leave out a lot that happened in-between, but in summary, I left school, began working in a nursing home and subsequently spent almost twenty years working in nursing roles, the bulk of that in what were called, in those days, Emergency Rooms.*  I rather liked the work, as it was undeniably useful, and the broad ad-lib nature of the responsibilities fostered teamwork between staff. There was something else about it too: if one’s own life was not going smoothly or following some path of professional advancement, a great many of the people you took care of were having a worse day than whatever day you were having.

In the mid-Seventies I decided to try to teach myself how to play guitar, and a couple of years later I moved to Minneapolis Minnesota, where I reconnected with Dave Moore. In the middle of that decade a musical movement was forming which had no name for a year or so until it started being called “Punk.” Once something gets a label, folks will come along and take what the label describes as a goal or set of expectations that should be met — but the musical acts that were already there when that label was created didn’t have those restrictions. They were all over the place in musical intents and tactics.

But there was something that united those that were there to be called “punk” founders ex-post-facto. I’ll use this military metaphor: what happens when a regime has fallen, when the standing armies are no longer functioning, yet a struggle continues? Pressed into the battle are the irregulars, the untrained — and those punk-before-the-name bands prime movers were often: poets, artists, & writers, not musicians. Nor were these figures reactionaries who hated hippies, Rock’s traditions, or exploratory musical moves. For the large part they wanted to take up the fallen banners of what had been exciting about Sixties music and to carry them forward. Where they were in opposition, they were against those credentialed musical acts that weren’t doing that.

Well Dave Moore and I were writers, poets. I’d learned a little about how to play guitar. Dave could play keyboards. This new musical moment was allowing a new “underground” of original music bands to pop up in Minneapolis. What Sixties banner could we take up?

The list of artists we shared as touchstones would be long, and what we thought we could take from them would be a long list too. Let me select but one: The Fugs.

Andrew Hickey, the writer behind the excellent music-head project The History of Rock Music in 500 Songs has a maxim he deploys often in his work: “There’s no first of anything.” When a wise writer gets to questions like “What was the first Rock record” or “Who first played electric guitar” and stuff like that, it’s actually impossible to set objective criteria or establish exact dates, but being aware of that useful maxim, the Fugs can be claimed the first Punk band, and they didn’t start in the middle-Seventies, but in the middle-Sixties.

The Fugs and their implications and cultural inflections are too long a story to tell in this post. If my energy holds out, I’ll make my account of the Fugs a “bonus episode” here, but in short, starting at the beginning of 1965 in NYC’s Greenwich Village, two poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg began caterwauling songs with various accomplices in what they advertised as “Total Assault on the Culture.” I suspect they saw themselves as an outgrowth of the “Jug Band Music” branch of the Fifties and early Sixties folk music revival,* but the Fugs material was a substantial expansion from the folk-revival jug bands. The Fugs performed single-entendre odes to sex acts, anarchist satire and political protest, translated excerpts from ancient Egyptian or Greek literature, settings of literary poetry, dispatches from drug takers, and the other daily concerns of Bohemia.

Kuperberg and Sanders did not have professional voices. Their first album is so out of tune that the vocal timbres can drive even those that might entertain their political and cultural points to “turn that damn ‘singing’ off!” You’ve heard me sing here — that sort of “we’ll give it a go anyway” audacity actually comforted me.

Dave and I started playing informally in our living rooms, and between the two of us we quickly developed a dozen or more original songs. Our fresh material addressed the social issues of the on-coming Eighties: the Reagan rightward tilt, the local “big boys who always run things” (as Dave put it in one of his songs), and working class experiences. Unlike the Fugs we largely eschewed the aggressively sex-positive topics and the recreational drug-use reports.***  This rundown makes our early songs sound more like doctrinaire agitprop that I think they were. As songwriters we both were fond of the character study, which is by its nature more complex than a protest sign or bumper sticker.

Dave (the more businesslike and socially competent of the two of us) soon set us out to perform publicly by making arrangements with Ed Felien, a long-time city activist who was at the time running a café called Modern Times in South Minneapolis. We started to use a stage at one end of the dining area there to perform publicly.

See the LYL Band Modern Times Cafe Ash Wednesday by Dave Moore 800

One of Dave Moore’s posters for the LYL Band appearing at the Modern Times Cafe in the early Eighties

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Audiences were small, but it was fun to do. The stage had an upright piano for Dave to play and the place had two vocal microphones connected to a low-volume PA. I played an acoustic guitar which I had to pick with all my might to keep up with the volume of Dave’s two-handed piano chording. I was the weaker of the two of us as a performer, but because of our equality practice of alternating songs, I could feel that Dave’s steadier and more confidently presented songs could keep the audience satisfied, and I enjoyed the accompaniment role during his songs.

So one day, we’re playing on the Modern Times stage to a small crowd. Late in the first set we did a topical song of mine “The Ballad of J.W. Hinckley,”  a song set parodically to the form of Steely Dan’s “Do It Again.”  The song was voiced as being sung by the titular young man from a well-off family who had just shot President Reagan and his Press Secretary in the hopes of impressing Jody Foster. The point of the song was that due to Hinckley’s privilege and America’s laissez-faire gun regs, he was free to make his attempt even after he’d been caught trying to carry guns onto an airline flight. Yes, I suppose there was a wicked wink in my use of the chorus borrowed from Steely Dan’s song: “You go back, Jack, do it again” — but the subject of the Dan song is a chronic loser, and the Hinckley character in my song was non-heroic too.

We took a little break between sets and we were winding up the first song of our second stint when a thin older man entered the dining area carrying a long-gun. Dave was sitting at the piano, facing sideways, stage right. I was right down in front at the lip of the low stage. The man walked up next to the stage, raised his gun at me, and began his spiel.

So what! Let’s take up a song in honor of Mr. Reagan — in his honor….He’s a wonderful man. He may turn this country around. Let’s have both sides of the story. I think I am well educated (both sides) and I don’t have a pointy head anymore.”

Well, once again someone was missing the subtle point a song was trying to make — but I didn’t try to debate the armed man. In my ER job I’d dealt with many angry people, even agitated, insane folks in the midst of mania or paranoia. My default tactic in such ER cases was to listen to them calmly, perhaps waiting to gently redirect them if they calmed down or had a question. It was actually rare in my ER years to have to struggle to restrain them (those who had been violent outside were brought in already restrained).

I listened to the man talk, trying to present myself as interested in what he had to say. What he said seemed almost composed, as if he was (like myself) trying to perform. He was present for less than a minute, but in gun-time things slowed down. I remember trying to judge just how much height I had from the low stage: could I kick or throw myself down over the leveled barrel of the long gun, forcing it to ground, followed by my younger body pinning the older man? No, my acoustic guitar would impede me. I can’t recall if I thought to look at the position of the man’s trigger finger — perhaps I thought such a clear glance rather than paying attention to his speech might be a tell. I didn’t have time to recalculate much, as the man finished saying his piece, turned and walked out onto Chicago Avenue just as he had come in.

Dave, I suspect elevated in expressiveness from being in his outgoing performer mode, said into his vocal mic “We love it when guns show up!”

Did this incident cause me to have stage fright problems? You might think it odd, but it did not — I still wanted to perform, but my problem as a performer continued to be my lack of sufficient performer’s skills and my issues with being confident in what I was able to convey, leading to a progression within a performance of accumulating failure of “nerve,” and the ability to project confidence.

On top of one of the tables in the Modern Times dining area, I had placed a little tape recorder to record our performance. I’d hit record for the second set minutes before the man walked in with the gun. Later that year when we created our only official record, we melded in part of the incident as an intro to the studio version of “The Ballad of J.W. Hinckley,”  and you can hear that with the audio player below. One additional note on the ending part captured in this performance of the song: in my younger years I could improvise poetry over guitar. I think I was modeling that on early Patti Smith, whose first recorded pieces captured at poetry readings were done that way.

Audio player gadget below. What, no gadget to be seen? It’s not stage fright, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog will suppress showing the player.  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*In most hospitals these days they’ve been expanded to departments or subsections, with varying services. All the systems that deal with the acutely ill, trauma victims, mental health crises, or those that have no other place to go for healthcare have been expanded — and I lived through a lot of that change in my lower-level position — but the first Emergency Room that I worked in was literally a room or two located by a ground level entrance where an ambulance could pull up likely staffed by folks with a higher degree of licensure to drive a commercial vehicle than medical training.

**This was in effect a largely white effort to revive a largely Afro-American genre of string band music with vocals that often would include double entendre songs performed at lively tempos. One advantage in the commercial folk-revival was that a jug band group could allow more specialization, grouping effective instrumental musicians with appealing singers. In the mid-Sixties US West Coast, the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish started as jug band revivalists. On the East Coast, Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band and the Loving Spoonful worked out of that style.

***Exceptions? We did cover two Fugs tunes “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side”  and “I Couldn’t Get High;”  and though we never played them live, we did play the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat”  and an original song adapted from a local poet’s poem called “Pussy from the Black Lagoon”  that was renamed on our sole official recording to “Lucy from the Black Lagoon.”

The Fugs were typical male mid-century bohemians in that women’s equality and perspectives were issues rarely addressed. One of my early original songs from 1980 dealt with the then famous case of Mary Cunningham, a freshly promoted VP at the Bendix Corporation who was rumored to be having an affair with the CEO. Employees gossiped, and the Corporation’s board requested that Cunningham be fired. She resigned. The CEO? He remained. I didn’t know then, and I can’t find a quick answer in a web search today if they were actually having an affair, though the two did marry

Four Performances-Part One: a 19-year-old Reads Leonard Cohen

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I don’t know what I should tell him about the performance.

I think I know some things he doesn’t, but of course all knowledge is transient, subject to new knowing, new conditions. And the matter is complicated because the person whose performance I’ll present today is by my teenage self.

I was a few weeks into being 19. I was beginning my second year of what will become a foreshortened higher education at a small college in Iowa. The year before, my first year there, had been a high point of my then shorter life. I met my continued friend and musical co-conspirator Dave Moore there, along with his partner Celia Daniels; Jim Scanlon from Chicago, a right guard football player who wore an ankle length wool cape and shared lefty politics; John Schuler, a southern Illinois boy who soon grew a full John Brown beard and became a searcher for American ideals; and Louis Fusco, an east-coast kid who told me he’d sat right next to Steve Winwood’s organ on a stage back in Fusco’s hometown, and who like me had a little cassette deck and liked to record with it. Since I had grown up in a 700 population town near nothing much more than that, I’d never met anyone with these varieties of interests and experiences. I had made do with reading. First, 19th century gothic Poe, then iconoclasts like Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, and William Blake. Listening too: The Fugs and the Mothers of Invention, the skeleton key blurt of Bob Dylan, the psych-fi of the Jefferson Airplane, and that Rimbaud of Venice Beach: Jim Morrison.

But all that was assimilated inside my own head — an empty auditorium. Now an old man, that’s where these things, and much since, still echo.

I’d likely tell that teenage me that I was not conscious of class differences. I’m largely right in that — but the 19-year-old might say I knew of those differences, he was just ignoring them. In this time-spanning colloquium I’d reply ignoring this is close-enough-same to ignorance. The school had rich kids, and kids more secure in the mid-century middle-class than my family was. Besides the loans that seemed massive to me in Sixties dollars, I made ends meet as a “Work-Study” student, washing dishes and doing other tasks for the on-site food service. Most of the students were there enjoying their draft deferments and class-appropriate dating and social opportunities — education was largely a customary set of exercises secondary to that.

At the end of my first year, Dave, Celia, and Jim all left this small Iowa college for a better one in Wisconsin. We’d all worked on an “underground newspaper” at the little Iowa college — mimeographed pages filled mostly with satire, though one page printed my first published poem, an ode to the new Brutalist student center on campus that owed a lot to my fresh fascination with Wallace Stevens. That newspaper may have been how I was selected as editor of the official college newspaper for my second college year at the end of my first. I was the last man standing from that independent effort, even though I knew nothing of the editorial role. Celia gave me a crash-course in print layout and production, and I learned in a day from her things that I still used years later.

I’d first met Dave Moore when he presented a Sunday service at the college chapel in the fall of my first college year. The service included his reading from Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun  and Bob Dylan’s “With God on our Side.”   So, as the new school year began, this elevated-by-vacuum me decided to present something similar.

There were a couple of problems with that: I was (still am) a lousy performer — but I didn’t know this yet; and I would have to find something to present, choose a message which I’d justify by what was billed and playing inside the auditorium of my head. For some people this might be a good enough idea: their internal repertory aligns with the zeitgeist. With mine — not so much.

What was playing in my head? Leonard Cohen. In my last year of High School I heard a recording by Noel Harrison, the nepo-baby son of famous non-singer Rex Harrison performing Cohen’s song “Suzanne.”   That 45-single record had briefly fallen within the nether borders of the local Top-40 format radio station, and hearing it with no introduction or other context was profound. It starts like a somewhat genteel love/or crush song — but bang! there in the second verse Cohen brings Jesus in, as a character fully as present in the song as the love object — and then, as you’re reeling from this, the final verse assays a synthesis of the first two verses while folding in some workman sailors. Sixties pop songs were allowed psychedelia by then, but few leapt and gathered with such craft and reach. “Suzanne”  and its value had been discovered by Judy Collins the year before, and it was placed on her LP In My Life  where it kept company with songs by the Beatles, Brecht/Weill, and Dylan. Since hearing Collins’ version presumed access to the LP, it was Noel Harrison on the radio who did the job of introducing Cohen to me before I encountered Collins’ better version.*

There was a strong resemblance later in Cohen’s career: in the 21st century Cohen’s song “Hallelujah”  went from his own recording of it that his record company deemed uncommercial** to a widely beloved song of generalized endurance. How many were drawn by the similar jump cuts of devout psalmist David and his functional harmony lesson, the same’s Biblically accurate homicidal lust, and the light bondage of being tied to a kitchen chair? How many elided over the sex and stuck with the spirituality? I can’t say, but my judgement then, like my judgement of the bubbling under “Suzanne”  in the Sixties was that many heard a different song than I was hearing. And expressing that difference could be, well, easily felt as snobbish.

Dunn Library

My campus memory fades, so I’m not sure this is the correct side of the library where the performance took place. The library was less than 5 years old then, and subsequent landscaping may have changed the grassy area.

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So, one early fall dusk, in The Sixties, on a small Iowa college campus, I gathered my coterie for this chapel service, outdoors on a grassy mound by the library. I can’t recall why outside rather than inside the chapel, though the chapel bells can be heard on the recording announcing the start. Brian Lynner, who’d founded the college’s SDS chapter but was now concentrating on becoming a good actor would sing “Suzanne.”   Another student, who’d I’d met just a couple of weeks before, Don Williams,*** would play a fine rendition of a Leo Kottke song,**** and talk briefly about selfhood. And I would perform — for the first time really. I didn’t play guitar. I didn’t sing. I’d read from Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers.

Beautiful Losers is an unusual book, ostensibly a novel. It contains everything found in the jump cuts of “Suzanne”  and “Hallelujah”  and then some. There’s polymorphous sex, a lengthy sub-plot on the as yet uncanonized 17th century Native-American Catholic saint Kateri Tekakwitha, a hilarious deconstruction of the famous Charles Atlas comic book ad, a vibrator that attains sentience, and much, much more, including a remarkable litany about magic that seemed apt for performance to me,*****  but I started my Cohen reading with something else from the book: a satiric recounting of the contradictory desires a likely Cohen stand-in character had for his life before flowing into the more celebratory and spiritual litany of “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot.”

Not the best order I’d tell that teenager now. The first section likely alienated the audience before the second could beguile them. And to conclude the service as a matter of benediction, I read short poem of my own, one that sounds presumptuous and pretentious to me now. That teenager thought he was being brave. Is he right, at least in part, at least from his side? Oh, if only we could sit, separated as I pretend today, and talk.

You can hear my part of the chapel service, recorded live on a cassette tape in The Sixties with the audio player below. If the player doesn’t appear out of the mist of memory, it’s only that some ways of reading this suppress it, and I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Collins is largely responsible for Cohen becoming a musical performer. When he played “Suzanne”  for her, he told her he wasn’t even sure it was song (it had been a page poem first) and Collins assured him it was a very good song. Shortly after this, and her recording of it, Collins cajoled Cohen to perform “Suzanne”  at a benefit concert. Her account of this is somewhat surprising, as Cohen had been documented previously as a skilled performer reading his own poetry in 1965’s “Ladies and Gentlemen Mr. Leonard Cohen,”  and in broadcast interviews on cultural programs he was consistently provocative and confident in even the earliest extant interviews. But the Collins story has it he stumbled only partway into the song, tried to leave the stage, and was only able to complete the song with Collins returning to the stage and singing the song beside him. I knew none of this in The Sixties, but Leonard Cohen, the man who was to inspire this simultaneously over-and-underconfident teenager in Iowa, was in this account capable of conflicted shame in calling forth his performing nerve.

**The immortal words of his record company said after hearing and rejecting the album containing “Hallelujah”  were “Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.”

***I keep saying this to the void, but I owe Don Williams an immense debt. His approach to guitar (I suspect secondary to his family’s ability to provide him lessons back in his Minneapolis hometown) formed the basis of my approach to the instrument to this day. Due to Don Williams’ entirely generic name (no, he’s not the late 20th century country crooner) I’ve never been able to track him down to thank him.

****Kottke would have been largely unknown outside of the Twin Cities at this point. His 6 and 12-string Guitar  (the “Armadillo LP”) was freshly released on John Fahey’s tiny Tacoma label, and the Kottke song Williams sang was written before that LP.

*****The same year, singer Buffy Sainte-Marie thought so to, and recorded a musical performance of the “God is Alive, Magic Is Afoot”  section of the novel. Other than that passage, nothing of Cohen’s novel made much of an impression on the culture, even among the eventual admirers of Leonard Cohen as a singer-songwriter. Cohen himself didn’t retrospectively speak much of it, describing it as a grab-bag, last-ditch effort to make a literary reputation beyond his native Canada just before his pivot to music. Cohen did recount though that when he first met Lou Reed at the Chelsea Hotel in NYC in 1966, Reed immediately gushed: “You’re the one who wrote Beautiful Losers!”

I had a guinea golden

~ Frank Hudson ~ 4 Comments

It’s known that Emily Dickinson played piano, but my scattershot scholarship doesn’t inform me if she played any other instrument, or exactly what kind of music she played or appreciated. Many of her poems use hymn or ballad meter, and I was still a young person when I first was told that you can sing many a Dickinson poem to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,”  or “The Theme to Gilligan’s Island.”

That factoid tells us that her metrical musical inspiration is hard to pin down, for in her 19th century a great deal of music followed that form. By our time, ballad meter is heard as presenting a certain kind of old-timey folk-music vibe — in Dickinson’s 19th century a wide variety of more or less contemporary music used it.*  Did she ever sing her poems, or perhaps noodle a tune on piano while composing poetry? I know of no accounts. Still, when I ran into this early Dickinson poem, written by her as a twenty-something before the bulk of her poems followed during her highly productive thirties, I couldn’t help but think of it as being made to be sung.

“I had a guinea golden”  is a poem about loss of friends or lovers, and it’s not hard to think it a characteristic work of someone in their twenties. Dickinson grew up in a dynamic time, in a small college town. Her school-and-college-age friends would, as they likely would today, be due to scatter to occupational and romantic opportunities during that decade of life, and the biographic data on Emily Dickinson would give us a goodly number of separations from meaningful people in her life during this time. From memory, I can think of only one who was separated by death in this part of Dickinson’s life (Benjamin Franklin Newton) — and I mention that because it may be impossible to be certain about how seriously Dickinson took this poem’s lament at losses.

My suspicion is that “I had a guinea golden”  is layered. That it catalogs more than one loss (the guinea coin, the singing robin, the bright star) and takes time to note that each of these losses are not generally the loss of wealth, bird song, or a starry firmament seems to say to me that these losses are less serious than they feel. In letters to those Dickinson longed to hear from, she often takes a stance that she feels betrayed or onerously deprived of contact from her separated friends. In the informality of friendly correspondence that reads as playful there, and so it could well be here in this poem too. As we reach the poem’s — now song’s — conclusion, I suspect this lawyer’s daughter (unlike our country’s mad king) well knows that unforgiveable treason is not actually indictable just because someone has traveled away from Amherst. But even if playful, the piece does speak to how these losses feel, and in performance I chose not to wink at the pain of the symbolic losses portrayed.

Guinea_1775

Back in 1775 this mad king was taxing and tariffing Americans out of spite, and sending government troops to “protect” American cities that wanted no part of his chaotic misrule. This was the gold guinea coin that might have paid those troops.

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Well frankly, I was glad to be able to use the limited instrument of my voice once again to record anything. Since late June I have had some kind of flu or respiratory bug that had me greatly fatigued, coughing, and so brain-fogged I could read only superficially. I’m not sure that intentional irony has yet come back fully online, so I performed “I had a guinea golden”  as a serious lament. I’ll let Dickinson’s words and the listener provide the layered context. You can hear my performance with the audio player gadget you should see below. No player visible? “Treason!” “Exile!” “Avicide!” No, it’s just that some ways of viewing this blog suppress the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Poets too, including ones we know Dickinson read, used the format for literary ballads not necessarily meant to be sung.

Young People Scream

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Today’s post will combine a few things: there will be a link to a video of a new odd cover version of a song “Young People Scream,” written by someone who’s not Bob Dylan, and I’ll continue the behind-the-scenes story of how I’m making new musical pieces, but first I’ll explain why posts and interactivity from me has been low since the last part of June.

I’ve been sick for over a week with some kind of respiratory bug, and for a big chunk in the middle of it I was about as sick as I recall being for decades. At the worst, I was feverish and my stamina was very low — walking to the bathroom was a chore. I slept off on through a few days, and when awake I was foggy, unable to deal with any complexity.* Things have been improving over the past couple of days, though I still have a cough and tire easily. My wife preceded me with the same crud, and she’s still got her cough, so I’ll likely be dealing with that for a while yet.

I’ve been exploring some changes in how I record with my long-time friend, poet, songwriter, keyboard player, and alternative Parlando vocalist Dave Moore. A combination of things is suggesting those changes, part of which is that Dave’s playing skill-set has become constrained with age’s infirmities. I wrote last time that MIDI will give us new options to ground the pieces’ chordal cadences within modern computer recording software. Will this work, or do I even know exactly how I’m predicting it will work? Don’t know yet. I’m getting some more cabling next week that I’m thinking will offer some additional audio routing in my studio space for Dave, but today’s cover song recorded in June is an example of a way MIDI was used to shape a recording.

Super-quick intro: MIDI is a way to record things, but it doesn’t record audio. Typically, it records what actions happen when someone plays a controller — in Dave’s case, a piano-style keyboard. If Dave presses the C, E, and G keys on that keyboard, MIDI records when he pressed each of them, how hard he struck them, and how long they were depressed. The sound of that C Major chord we hear when those notes are playing together is created as a separate step. As he plays, a sound is heard, just as if he was playing an organ or conventional electric piano, but this sound is generated by software with only a small fraction of a second delay. An entirely conceptual composer could even play MIDI with no sound, but aside from Conlon Nancarrow humans naturally want to hear sounds when they use the controller keyboard.

As Dave played today’s piece live with me a few weeks ago, he heard a combo organ sound as he played and sang his part. There was a drum loop going to give us a time reference, and I played the electric guitar part you will eventually hear live with Dave and the placeholder drums.

Afterward I listened analytically to what had been played live. His without-a-net, one-pass vocal worked — and as I’ll talk about in the next segment, I discovered that I loved the song he chose to sing. My guitar part was meh, not good enough to feature, but not totally dire. That organ part? It had a few stumbles, but the greater problem was that the vocal had a nice laid-back groove, but the organ’s characteristic timing, attack, and timbre didn’t mesh with that feel. How to fix?

I extracted the MIDI from what Dave played, stripping things back to the chordal structure divorced from the sound. I used that chordal structure laid bare to guide an upright bass part, and using acoustic drum sample patterns I created a Jazzy-sounding drum set track. Having the drums, bass, and guitar grooving together, I used the program that extracted Dave’s chords for me to play that chord information derived from the live performance with a grand piano sound instead of the small combo organ Dave was hearing as he played them live.**

The resulting piece is here in this video.

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Now what about the song that all this work was done to present? I suspect “Young People Scream” speaks to something some young people are feeling. Hell, I’m not young people, and I’m feeling this! Given that it was first released in 1982 by a still in his Twenties singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, there’s a lot of ambiguity and context shifting when we experience the same song today — probably was so from the beginning too, because Robyn Hitchcock has a long career that I’ve admired of writing songs that are attractively elusive. He may do this using surrealism’s tactic, the remixing normal to seem strange, but in this one I sense asides to irony and satire.

Hitchcock’s own version on his Groovy Decay album was performed with a rock-a-billy arrangement. This would have been then a 30-year-old musical style, but one that had been revived by young musicians spinning off from the Punk and New Wave musical rebellion — and so, “Rock This Town” by the Stray Cats was a 1982 hit. Conscious or not, I suspect a certain slyness on Hitchcock’s observation and choice there: young people in 1982 using their parents’ youthful rebellion’s mode — a mode they’d largely abandoned with embarrassment as those thirty-something Boomers moved on to the modern Rock and pop sounds or the “Greatest Hits of the Sixties, Seventies, and the Eighties.” As the first verse has it, tweaking those younger rock revivalists by telling them “It all been done before” could get a “don’t care” reply.

Despite the upright bass in this current LYL Band version, it’s not hot-tempo rock-a-billy. Instead, I wanted to let the tension-releasing satiric vitriol delivered with a dry “just the facts” attitude by the singer come through. Even if he’s not literally screaming, I think the singer, to a degree of undercurrent, has to appear driven around the bend with their disgust at the older generation — and while I don’t know the author’s intent, I think Hitchcock’s words convey that indignation. The video ends with the on-screen statement it does because I’m “older people” and I’m disgusted, though my throat is still too sore to scream aloud today.

*It was difficult to read when awake, though I had some intense fever dreams while sleeping for entertainment. I did catch up on some episodes of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, which are outstandingly detailed and interwoven. If you like the surprising stories and unlikely connections I do here, and would like that sort of thing done at greater length and intelligent confidence within the world of Rock and popular music, you will like this too.

**The program I used for this, Toontrack’s EZKeys, does a pretty good job of automatic transcription. I’ve also used the Capo transcription app for this, but I think Toontrack’s chord detection may use some musical context information that Capo doesn’t in order to get closer to a useful chord sequence right off. Something that EZKeys clearly does: it allows one to apply music grooves or feels to the chord cadence it extracts, which saves considerable time. Those with good harmonic ears could of course do this by hand (with one’s ear? Musicians, we poets will dock you for mixed metaphor!)

The Sound of Sense

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Today’s piece is kicking off a Summer where I’m going to be doing some different things here than what the Parlando Project usually does. Though the Project’s “usual” varies, the capsule description typically applies: “Combines various words (mostly other people’s literary poetry) with original music in differing styles.” What’s coming this Summer?

I’m not entirely sure yet. There may be more behind-the-scenes stuff, even some “inside baseball” topics about recording, composition, and musical instruments. I think, some personal memoir, a few more peculiar “cover versions” of other folk’s music — we’ll see. I’ve never emphasized those things, so I don’t know how this will work yet. Come September, I intend to return to our regular stuff: writing about my experience of other poets and their poems as the Project moves toward its 10th anniversary. I hope there will still be some things of interest to those who come here for that. For regular readers, particularly those that have followed this Project for a while, I’m hoping you’ll enjoy this Summer’s personal digressions.

I recorded music with Dave Moore last week. Dave and I have known each other since we were teenagers, and we’ve made music as the LYL Band for 45 years. For much of that time Dave was a driving two-handed keyboard player, pounding first an upright piano, then a Farfisa combo organ and electric piano. The Farfisa had grey keys for the bass register, and Dave was often effectively the bass player in the various LYL lineups. Two-handed keyboard players are a tough thing to integrate into the typical Rock band. That kind of playing can fill a lot of the harmonic space — but in some of Rock’s history, guitar voicings are expected to outline the chords. As it turns out, this was OK for me, as I was never a competent conventional rhythm guitar player. Though LYL had an additional guitar player sometimes, I worked out an unconventional role, most often playing single notes and double stops that decorated the chords that Dave laid down, or adding timbral color with guitar effects.

By the turn of the century, we fell into a regular pattern: around once a month we’d set a date. Just before the appointed time, I’d be ready in my studio space and would start to play a little melodic line or spare pattern. Dave would come by a few minutes later, let himself in, and he’d walk up to the keyboard position in the studio space as I continued to play. I’d lean over and reveal the key I was playing in, and off we’d go. I’d have some words ready, a literary poem for Parlando perhaps. Our familiarity bred musical content: I was accustomed to Dave’s keyboard moves, he likely knew mine after all this time too. We’d extemporize a weaved top line. In 2-6 minutes I’d wind it up. We’d say hi to each other. Dave would next hand me a sheet of lyrics. Sometimes with chords, sometimes just some jottings as to predominant ones or key, sometimes just the words. He’d start to play and sing and I’d find my way to play something that I hoped would fit in. That piece would end, and then I’d hand Dave a chord sheet with lyrics to something I had put together. Though sparse, my sheets would be more organized, allotting info for Dave to drive the basic harmonic content for what I would sing and play along with him.

The alteration proceeded as such from there.* After about an hour we’d take a break, talk a bit, and then we’d pick up the rotation for another hour. There would sometimes be partial takes, even (rarely) a “let’s play through it again” request. There’d be short delays as we shuffled through papers, or switched instruments or keyboard sounds, but there wasn’t much deliberation.

What did the recordings reveal afterward? Some trainwrecks certainly. Some searches for inspiration that snoozed off. Particularly in my case, a lot of poor attempts at singing. None-the-less, there’d also be some stuff I’d think worth working with. You’ve heard some of those spontaneous live-in-the-studio takes here.

As it happens, other than their being two alternating songwriters, this is close to how Bob Dylan worked in the studio throughout much of his career — though he worked with trained studio musicians for the most part — skilled folks who could bring a lot more facility that Dave or I can supply.**

Why’d Dylan do that? Well, I’ll have to ask him, though somehow, I haven’t had the chance. My guess is that when it did work, a real sense of something happening in the room among a group of people was transmitted. An exploration. An edge of the seat, this hasn’t yet been formed, a how will it turn out feeling the listener can share.***

Let me repeat myself for necessary clarity: my skillset as a musical instrument operator is such that I think that it doesn’t fulfill the job description of a musician. I won’t impose a summary on Dave, but I think he’d be unlikely to claim high-level musical skills. I do call myself a composer, and Dave has started to call me a producer. I wish I had more skills, but I work artistically with the ideas and actualities I have.

New Studio Space MIDI keyboard

One thing was different last week. For nearly 20 years Dave usually played an older non-MIDI keyboard at my studio space. I may write more about the context later, but I’m thinking it’s time to move to MIDI. Dave has no experience with MIDI and computer instruments, so this will be a journey. I was able to find a good open-box example of this affordable, semi-weighted MIDI keyboards with aftertouch.

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So, last week, after decades of this, when Dave and I met, I was in progress, playing a guitar riff, and he, on arrival, began playing electric piano. I had set out a drum loop and had a bass track running that hung around the key center. The piece I read as I played my electric guitar was a sonnet, a recent one in my sonnet-series about Alzheimer’s disease and a care-home for those suffering from it — and how we, outside the disease, interact with those within it. “The Sound of Sense”  doesn’t lie: Robert Frost actually did think there was a basic undercurrent in how poetry works — that it’s like how we hear others speaking just out of earshot.

Dave’s not Bill Evans or McCoy Tyner. I’m not John Coltrane or Mike Bloomfield. Some people say I sing like Bob Dylan, but I think on a good day I might sound something like Bob on a bad day. Here’s something I’ve been thinking lately, as successful music gets more produced and marketed from the moment of conception on: it’s still good to have some notes made that don’t know what the note to follow will be. If that next note is unexpected, even “off,” — well that’s better than always knowing what the next note is. And that latest artistic worry: Artificial Intelligence and LLMs? They’re programmed to work-to-rule, creating statistically what you’d expect next.

Two old guys playing live in the studio together. I perform a sonnet I recently wrote that Dave hasn’t heard. He and I weave together in a loose, homespun warp and woof, and unlike a lot of poets reading to music, I spend a minute playing electric guitar at the end, trying to not play the next note that you’d expect. You can hear that performance with the audio player below. No player? You aren’t out of AI credits or something — this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

I hope we’re going to have an interesting summer.

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*When other musicians played with Dave and I, I tried to continue that strict arbitrary rotation — everyone got to start a piece in turn.

**A few years back a huge box-set including alternate partial and unsuitable takes from Dylan’s classic Sixties period was issued. Fascinating, listening to and hearing the outright failures or “just not it” attempts. Given what I know those musicians involved could  do, knowing those failures keep me from utter despair when I listen to a busted LYL take uttered from my limited skill-set.

***Some classic Jazz recordings of the LP era were done this way, though often with a substantial shared mental “book” of structures and cadences for the skilled musicians to rely on. It may be one of those shared illusions, as there’s no strictly technical reason that Kind of Blue  or A Love Supreme  couldn’t have been recorded as most modern pop music is recorded: many instrumental tracks played separately and laid behind featured top-line tracks constructed of many passes collaged together. Those old Jazz records feel like the musicians are breathing together in the room to me, in my mind’s eye I can see them glance at each other — but we can be fooled.

Meru

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Poet William Butler Yeats had interests and a life that spanned times and poetic styles. His earliest poems whole-heartedly exhibit 19th century romanticism and prosody, but like the English Pre-Raphaelites he sought to vividly revive elements of the deeper past while doing so. His interests beyond poetry ranged as well. Last time I performed Yeats, I mentioned he had deep interests in esoteric magic, and yet the same man had a firm grounding in civic poetry while supporting an Irish cultural revival and independence from England. A poet with an already established style, he crossed paths with the American and British Modernists early in their revolution, and his later poetry shows that rather than getting his back up about their changes, he adapted some of their make-it-new approaches. Yeats employed influential American Modernist critic Ezra Pound during Modernism’s rise, and while he dipped his toes into fascist movements,* unlike Pound he seems to have drawn back from that.

Today’s piece, “Meru,”  is a late poem in Yeats’ career. I find it balancing the worldly and spiritual, and on no more authority than my own necessary to come to grips to perform it, I see it as commenting on the rise of rapacious authoritarians contemporary with its composition in the 1930s.**   Here’s a link to the poem as Yeats published it.

“Meru”  is a sonnet, a rather regular one structurally. Though the word we use for this lyric poetry form literally means “little song,” many sonnets are hard for me to perform with music. Their length is good, and lyric poetry in this context means that they focus on a compressed scope of time and experience — but the form rarely uses refrains, a powerful, almost indispensable, tactic for song attractiveness. Seeking a good musical structure, I divided Yeats one-stanza poem into four verses, with refrains after verses two and four.

Meru

The song form I reformed Yeats’ sonnet into. Note the chords shown are what I fretted on guitar, but I used a capo on fret 3, so the piano, bass, and the song song sound in Eb.

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What do I think, as I chose to perform this, the poem conveys?

I like Yeats opening here, with its circular word-choice of “hooped,” for describing civilization’s shared beliefs. I’m unaware that this is any kind of established British Isles idiom, and the choice of this scene-setting word seems to invoke something like a key-ring or perhaps a wooden barrel or cask — and in the last image, that’s a construction that can fall apart. The opening statement continues to say civilization’s order is only an illusion, but the first three lines end by reminding us that such creations of the human mind are none-the-less great movers of reality and life. I’ll come back to that at the end today.

The second, four-line, group is remarkable in its ferocity, and I think it’s a description of mankind’s often perverse desire to gather more power, more wealth, and perhaps something they vaingloriously ascribe as rough justice while doing so. The ending line of this section serves as my first refrain: “The desolation of reality” that results from this.

Third segment, as I read it, brings in a distinct element of Yeats’ occult beliefs, starting by reminding us that the “desolation of reality” is a repeating motif of history and the fall of empires. But what’s with the two mountains introduced? Everest is Earth’s highest mountain, but it’s remoteness and location in Tibet links it with a late 19th century form of occultism: Theosophy. Theosophy is too large a subject to go into here,*** but its founder posited that certain Ascended Masters located in Tibet held onto ancient secret wisdom becoming super-human in the process. Mount Meru is more obscure to most readers I suspect: it’s a symbolic mountain, and like other symbols such as Mount Ararat, the Garden of Eden, or the entrance to the underworld, it is not an actual fixed map point, but is often referred to as being in some part of the Himalayan region. Some read the poem’s plural hermits as two hermits, one-per-mountain, and Theosophy holds to two current Ascended Masters.

I suspect these Theosophical details were in Yeats’ mind as he wrote his poem, but I don’t know if he ever wrote about the genesis of this sonnet. And luckily for most readers (and listeners today) you don’t need to know any of that. After a description of desolation of nations, I think the image of two or more hermits, ascetics living naked in snow and ice shelters in famously remote places stands as an image of the other-worldly mystic surviving with nothing but belief and the knowledge that the world’s disasters are part of some reoccurring process driven by human greed for power and wealth. Is this removed survival our fall-back in today’s world of raging authoritarians, blinded in their ravening?

And once more, I suspect the aged Yeats was thinking of his own age, of the rising of fascist authoritarians then, not just specifics of Theosophy — as a poet, one uses the images in one’s cupboard. This aged singer certainly thinks of those men and the desolation they cause as I sing Yeats poem this month. The poem ends — and I refrain on this — with a twist on the old saw: “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” Chillingly, naked in the snow, Yeats has as his dawn consolations that all tyrants (and alas, all mankind’s) glory and monuments are gone.****

Is this fate? Is this prophecy? Is this inevitable? I’m no Ascended Master — if you are, you tell me. I’m just a composer drafted by words and asked to sing them. But I promised I’d come back to the “manifold illusion” of peace, of some sustainable rule without unleashed tyranny. “Man’s life is thought” the poem said. A diverted American poet turned President once spoke of a conception, a particular manifold illusion, imagined on: “Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” If enough believe, the mage’s trick works. I’d rather it be a kind trick.

You can hear my musical performance of Yeats’ “Meru”  with the audio player gadget below. Has the audio player become subject to the desolation of reality? No, just some ways of reading this blog suppress it. This highlighted link will conjure up a new tab with it’s own audio player so you can hear it.

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*I’m not a Yeats scholar, and there are surely many who know more about the man and these political matters. While disappointing, I was not surprised to see he found some connections in fascistic groups, as trappings of cultural nationalism and nostalgia for some mythic past were widespread then, just as they remain in the fascistic nationalists now crowding under the aged wings of my country’s self-fancied mad king.

**Because of the later date of publication, this poem may not be in the Public Domain in the US, and this entirely non-commercial project almost always uses work in that class out of respect for author’s rights. I’m making an exception here out of a renewed commitment to civic poetry in the current world.

***Here’s more info on Theosophy if you want to wade in deeper. Having had some interest in esoteric beliefs as a young person, I carried some knowledge of it as I encountered this poem. As the Wiki article points out, Theosophy continues to influence various “New Age” ideas, but I’m not a believer.

****Some readers of the poem hold the “His” in the last line to be a godhead. I’m not sure why that would be. Could it be the then traditional capitol letter at the beginning of the poetic line leads to that reading? Or is it some element of Theosophical mythology? There’s another, non-cap, “his” in the poem, and I read that pronoun, along with its partner, to refer to elements of mankind.

I Pity the Poor Immigrant

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It occurred to me: should I try to sing a version of Bob Dylan’s “I Pity the Poor Immigrant?”  Afterall, I, without a plan, seem to be performing songs from Dylan’s 1967 LP John Wesley Harding  recently, and that song is one of the more noted ones from the album. And immigrants, and immigration, are currently a preoccupation of my country’s inept and callous administration.

Dylan might have been writing of his own family’s immigrant history in this song — being second-generation from his grandparents emigration from the Russian Empire and Turkey. Furthermore, he grew up in the iron-ore mining area of Minnesota, a place full of folks with wide-ranging immigrant backgrounds. Given Dylan’s, and folk-song’s in general concern for the underdog, one might expect this to be a song of empathy for these close-in immigrants.

Yet when Dylan sang his song in 1967, still a young man,* there’s a duality in its presentation. The immigrants within it are portrayed then as poor not only in wealth, but also in spirit. For all of Dylan’s genius, the voice that sings this song largely speaks about how the immigrants, who’d be the elders of his town and family, are stunted in their outlook. Dylan may be a genius, but this could be the disappointed vision of a young person who sees the faults and failures there. That’s what many young people, even those who aren’t geniuses, do, and it’s an important task.

His singing on this 1967 version is calm, not accusatory — at moments even sounding concerned as he decries the immigrants fallen state. If the harmonicas play the skeleton keys to the song’s interior, the passionate timbre of his playing on that instrument in the song may well be saying he feels sorrowful about the situation. The performance doesn’t lay any blame on poverty, exploitation, or the hard road of feeling the need to leave one’s homeland to find succor with strangers. Dylan, whatever he’s expressing here, likely knows these factors. Perhaps he assumes we do too.

I think Dylan’s aim was to confound the expected here — to write a great song instead of a good one, some mere piece of civic songcraft.

I’m not a young man, and I would have to go back to relatives I never knew, and who therefore can’t be blamed for imperfect mentorship or spiritual poverty. And I know from my life, and in my time, what immigrants contribute to my country. Some of course are noticeable success stories, but I think too of the many who do the hardest and least-rewarded work of the nation. I’m hesitant to pick a bone with the quality of their spiritual insight while they are trudging through unglamourous work — but even more so in 2025 when they also get slammed by disreputable politicians as criminals, scofflaws, swindlers, and parasites. I’m sure there are some immigrants who are those things, but I’m also quite sure that those slathering on those broad charges include in themselves a good measure of those failings — and are so eagerly pointing at immigrants to divert focus on that.

So, this is how I came to create this new performance of Dylan’s song, one for our time and situation. I changed only a few words, but by phrasing and refocusing my aim from Dylan’s original performance, I tried to illuminate those opposing scapegoating forces to the immigrant’s lot.** I may not even have made a (downgraded) good song of it, but I got some things off my chest I felt I had to say.

I can’t identify all the sources for the pictures used here. Alas, my stock photo library was bereft of any suitable pictures.

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*When he wrote this, Dylan had only young children, ones not yet able to judge him and his generation’s failings. Has an older Dylan, now a grandfather, revisited this song? AFAIK, no. Expert Dylanologists may have more info, but Wikipedia says it was last performed during the latter legs of the Rolling Thunder tour many decades ago, and then as a bizarre rollicking up-tempo jaunt.

As I said recently when a reader/listener pointed out that I may have completely misread Blake’s “Holy Thursday,” my theories about what was behind Dylan’s creation of this song are in no way meant to be definitive. They are just what I hear in it, and feel free to think my new recasting of the song is a sacrilege. I’ll plead that one part of Dylan’s genius is that he sees fit to approach his own work in highly different ways, and I’m just doing what I learned from the master. You should feel something to sing a song, and this is what I felt. Feel different? Sing the song yourself.

**Even fewer words in my plan than you’ll hear in the video, as some other different words slipped in by accident while singing. Here’s a link to the original lyric. Changing the song’s concluding couplet is the only indictable premeditated felony, and the video underlines my approach to make the sins that Dylan’s 1967 performance directed at only the immigrants as more of a dialectic. An accidental, unintended, change that I regret in this version: “Shatter like a  glass” is inferior to the original “Shatter like the  glass,” and looses the possible intra-album connection with the glass that has fingers pressed up against it in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”

Blake’s Other Holy Thursday, from Songs of Experience

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Unlike its Songs of Innocence partner, William Blake’s other “Holy Thursday”  poem has no plausible ambiguity in its view of childhood poverty. One reader wrote to remind me that the Songs of Innocence “Holy Thursday”  poem shows a peaceful, happy scene that I misread. They could be right! Allen Ginsberg famously thought Blake appeared to him and instructed the later poet by reading “Ah, Sunflower”  to him, but what instructs me to see undercurrents in the first Holy Thursday poem is reading more about what we believe we know about Blake’s beliefs. Reader Alan also reminds us the two poems’ connections should be examined — and that’s what I’ll do today, along with sharing a performance of Blake’s second song about Ascension Day.

Both Holy Thursday plates

As Blake illuminated and printed these two poems. One of the things I always admired about him: he was a self-contained, DIY, artist who learned what he needed to do to manifest his art.

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Let’s jump to the second poem, the one from Songs of Experience.*   Childhood poverty is an undercurrent in the first — would Blake even expect his readers to know that the children in the first poem are charity cases (many modern readers do not) — but poverty is foreground in the second. Blake takes on the mode of a Biblical prophet in this second poem and charges against the civic and/or religious state pour down from the start of it. Holy Thursday happens in springtime, but it’s “eternal winter” here. Its final stanza is preaching that this is not the natural order, and that in a polity of mankind’s natural state, the Earth’s fecundity would provide food for all.

I’m not sure we invariably think of Blake, for whom a spiritual element is clearly present, as a writer of civic poetry, as a political creature — yet modern scholars have subsequently delved into that element of the poet. Ginsberg, a civic poet of my youth, recognized a fellow civic poet in the prophetic Blake, and to deal with that is not to deny the spiritual element. I myself am no more a fine scholar than I’m a fine musician. In both professions, I’m simply and old man who does what he can in those fields haphazardly because he cannot wait longer at this point in my life to perfect those arts.

How do I currently think the two “Holy Thursday”  poems connect? I don’t want to put words into Alan’s mouth, he’s likely sharper than I can draw him, but he or others may believe that first poem is happy, innocent children in safe, supportive clerical care, uttering praise to their religious saviors/supervisors and that institution’s godhead and nation. And the second poem? Perhaps either a progression or another facet degraded from that? I’d say there’s no reason not to think that the two poems are happening at the same time in the same Britain — so, the two situations simultaneously comment on each other. The wards in the first poem may live better than the utter misery of the poor in the second, but they are part of the same civic system, the same “land of poverty.”  The thunder within the ward’s song that ascends briefly to heaven in the first, is the fecund rain that feeds all in the yet to be manifested world of the second. I’d summarize that Blake thinks that poverty and its partial charitable mitigations aren’t in opposition, but rather that poverty is a civic construction like the imperfect charity schools were. What Blake sees as opposition (in both poems) would be some Rosseauian natural state as the proper order of society. Yes! I realize that’s idealistic, that’s there’s no actual political party or plan ready to implement such an Eden. You can call it a fantasy. You’ll have good arguments to do so.

In my country, in my time, we’re at one of those political moments where forces in power wish to remind us that the poor are a disreputable burden, feeding off the productive citizens, wasting our resources of freedom and pleasure. You can call that a fantasy too. You’ll have good arguments to do so. But unlike the former view, this one’s on offer, even in the process of being implemented.

I’ve “progressed” from acoustic guitar to electric guitar in today’s “Holy Thursday,”  along with piano and percussion. You can hear it with the audio player below, or if that player is obscured in a field of thorns, you can get a rain check with this alternative highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Text linked here in case the picture of Blake’s original illuminated plate is too hard to make out.

Holy Thursday (from Blake’s Songs of Innocence)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 4 Comments

My parents had a small library, which was on a set of bookshelves in their bedroom in the house I grew up in in a little Iowa town. I’m not sure which books came from which parent, or even if some of them were passed down from their seniors, for I recall a couple of books on 19th century figures: William McKinley and Frances Willard. I think my mother’s people were Republicans, and both sides were teetotalers as far as I know. Some of the books were college textbooks. There were books relating to the Protestant ministry, which my father aimed to practice as his father had, and others connected to journalism and high school teaching, which was my mother’s line of work before marriage. I loved looking through them while laying on the chenille bedspread of their double bed.

I bring this up today because I believe I first encountered William Blake in one of those books of theirs. It wasn’t a poem of his, but rather a small note in the back of the volume dealing with other minor figures. The note reported that Blake wrote some quite fine short lyrics before descending into longer mystical tracts that might be seen as evidence of madness.

Having already gone through a short but intense Edgar Allen Poe phase when my teenage-self read that, my interest was piqued. A year or so later I learned that The Doors, a rock band headed by someone who was said to be a poet, had used a line from a Blake poem in one of their songs. Now I really was intrigued.

And yet it was maybe another year before I found and bought a small paperback containing selections from Blake’s writing. My initial reaction? The longer prophetic books puzzled me, many (but not all) of the shorter poems could come across as twee little nursery rhymes, but some of his poems that fell between those two became favorites, particularly his satiric and scathing “Proverbs of Hell.”   No teenager ever since deciphering metal-band lyrics or any rapper’s flow was more happy than I was to read that rebellious page poem.

Those short lyrics? I liked more of the poems Blake printed in Songs of Experience  than those in his companion volume Songs of Innocence.  Simplicity can be harder to value, and Songs of Innocence  is a case in point. Today’s piece is one of a pair of poems in Blake’s non-identical twin volumes using the title “Holy Thursday.”   Here’s a link to the text of this one.

First off, what’s Holy Thursday, at least as it relates to Blake’s poem? I didn’t know as a kid, and I didn’t know as an adult either until this year, so late in my life. I thought it was the Thursday before Good Friday, the date commemorating the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples before his arrest, trial, and execution. And as far as some Christian denominations go, that would be correct — but not so fast! Holy Thursday is also another date,* one at the very end of the Lenten calendar: the date commemorating the resurrected Jesus ascending into heaven after being seen on earth for 40 days by the disciples. That one falls on May 29th this year — or on the following Sunday, just to make things even more confusing.

We know that Blake is referring to the later Holy Thursday because the poem of his that I perform today is reportage on an annual British Holy Thursday (Ascension Day Edition) event: a marching of a batch of orphans from charity institutions up to London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral for a special mass where they sang hymns they’d been taught.

A few years ago the Tate Museum had a big Blake celebration and had one of Blakes most famous paintings projected onto the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. I wonder what Anglican dissenter Blake would have thought of that? (photo by Alex Wojcik for the Tate)

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Blake’s tone is ambiguous in his account. One could read this poem and assume this is an act of charity being celebrated — but in the context of Blake’s beliefs one could see otherwise, as he was an ardent dissenter from the state-sanctioned Church of England. Elsewhere in Songs of Innocence,  the children are free (at least at times) in some Edenic state — but these Holy Thursday children are regimented into ranks by schoolmasters (beadles) caring disciplinary canes. The song they sing is given to them by those that control their lives. What happens when they sing the song they are directed to sing? Heaven, the seat of the godhead that Jesus has risen to merge with, harmonizes in thunder that descends on the “wise guardians of the poor**” seated below the heaven and the children in this rich and mighty cathedral. In summary, I think Blake is pointing out the self-satisfied “virtue signaling” in this pomp and ceremony.

Perhaps I should have tried to create a choir or used a pipe organ for this one, but simple music today, which you can hear with the audio player gadget below. Has your audio player ascended into the Internet to sit as the right side of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing it.  This highlighted link will launch a new tab trailing heavenly glory — or at least its own audio player to carry forth my acoustic guitar and voice of subjective quality.

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*The Last Supper Thursday is also called Maundy Thursday — the other, Ascension Thursday or Day. Separate names would of course make things clearer. I grew up a Methodist, and they bungled the fix: they use all three (or is it four?) names.

**I sing this phrase as a question, which I divine is Blake’s intent.