Rock Scribes in Wonderland: A tsunami of music-related memoirs delivers few hits

Reviewing

There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll by Lisa Robinson (Riverhead Books: New York, NY, 2014 - 361 pp.); and especially
Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson by Kevin Avery (Fantagraphic Books: Seattle, WA, 2011 – 495 pp.).

 "Every honest man is a prophet. He utters his opinion on private and public matters."

- William Blake (1757-1827)

"You're looking at a small time operator in a small time business . . . All writers are punks and I am one of the punkest." 
- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)

Part One: The Ongoing Tsunami of Musical Memoirs

In sync with general nonfiction publishing trends, over the past decade a tsunami of memoirs by rock stars - and now rock critics - have flooded the bookstores and libraries of America. A precious few of them almost qualify as literature, such as poet/singer Patti Smith's Just Kids, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Others range from the insightful, such as Pete Townshend's memoir Who I Am (2012), to the amusing, including Keith Richards' Life (2010, co-authored by James Fox).

Most of these books, however, are either dull, self-aggrandizing or superficial, such as Rolling Stone writer/editor Rob Sheffield's 2010 teenaged reminiscences, Talking with Girls about Duran Duran. A curious music fan, I've strained my eyes and bored my brain on too many of them already. Roaming from A to Zevon (Crystal Zevon published a generous biography of her ex-husband Warren called I'll Sleep When I'm Dead in 2007), I've bought or borrowed a bookshelf load of these titles. I've read or scanned them eagerly, hoping to glean some nuggets of wisdom.

Yet I rarely find even a surprising turn of phrase between their pretty covers. Save yourself the disappointment: in most cases your time would be better spent listening to a good record instead. Lisa Robinson's There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll, for example, was a slog. I lost interest in that one early on. Mercifully, however, there are exceptions, including Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson, Kevin Avery's hybrid biography & annotated anthology.

Titles calculated to grab attention are surefire signs of desultory content. Willie Nelson passes a thin weak joint in Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings from the Road (2012 - sample aphorism: “If it ain't broke, break it!”). Parliament/Funkadelic icon George Clinton offers Brothas be, yo like George, ain't that funkin' kinda hard on you? (2014, written "with" Ben Greenman), a title that pushes this mercenary trick into the realm of the clownish and absurd. Most musicians and publishers, however, play it safe. For example, ex-Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon calls her freshly released memoir Girl in a Band (February 2015).

Even the enigmatic Bob Dylan and that busy Pono-inventor Neil Young got in the game. Both Young and Dylan arguably illuminate less about themselves in these pages than their best songs and recordings do. The magic conjured by the music is gone. Too many stories lie dead on the page, roadkill on the authors' Lost Highway of memory. Comparing a late passage from Young's prosaic Waging Heavy Peace (2012) to one from Dylan's more poetical Chronicles, Volume One (2004) gives a flavor of each author's approach. Using the weather as metaphor, they explain incidents from their rambling lives:

"We played Panama City, Clearwater, Hollywood, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, then we headed north to Farm Aid in Milwaukee. Farm Aid was a departure from our normal shows on that tour because of the forty thousand people and a stadium, but it was a good 'un! It's all about the music. If the music soars and you feel good, then the show is good. If for whatever reason the music does not soar, then it is not a good show. There is no way to tell what it will be like. It's like the weather." (- Neil Young)

"The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden. It was just too perfect. In a few years' time a shit storm would be unleashed. Things would begin to burn. Bras, draft cards, American flags, bridges, too -- everybody would be dreaming of getting it on. The national psyche would change and in a lot of ways it would resemble the Night of the Living Dead. The road out would be treacherous, and I didn't know where it would lead but I followed it anyway. It was a strange world ahead that would unfold, a thunderhead of a world with jagged lightning edges." (- Bob Dylan)

Given all the speculative hogwash and outright bullshit that's been written about them, you can't blame Young and Dylan for trying to set the record straight. But by offering their own versions of events, their own artistic interpretations, they nevertheless can't stake a claim to the whole truth. Readers, like sceptical detectives, have no obligation to buy anybody's story. Besides, we music fans are complicit in the bamboozlement that surrounds all popular art. Betrayed by our own psychological needs, we're trapped in a process of archetype-sharing that C.G. Jung called the collective unconscious. As a result, we persistently prefer the mythology surrounding our favorite rock 'n' roll gods to the less glamorous truth.

Adding to the degradation of pop culture, casual rock fans nowadays are mostly fed poisonous pablum by the corporate drones and media flacks who hawk the predictable music and promote the disposable stars (viz. the hit televised debacle American Idol and its ilk). Like drunken ancient Greek devotees of the party-god Dionysus, too many fans swallow the lullaby lies perpetuated by those who run Big Media and their partners, mainly the few remaining major record label groups.

Viv Albertine, co-founder of the pioneering all-female British punk band The Slits, opens her frank memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys (2014) with a refreshing admission: "Anyone who writes an autobiography is either a twat or broke. I'm a bit of both." Indeed, the drastic decline in revenue from compact-disc sales and print magazine advertising in the early 21st-century Internet economy may have driven musicians - as well as music journalists - to this. Their agents probably advised them that it's more lucrative to write tell-all books rather than cheaply downloaded songs or meager articles and reviews.

Times are tough in Old Media Land. The popular video website YouTube and the classified-ad behemoth Craigslist have drawn millions of young eyeballs away from television and print newspapers. Radio broadcasting has morphed into online custom jukebox services such as Pandora, while "narrowcasting" services like SiriusXM has a satellite that beams out hundreds of channels to Earth from space. The ever weirder World Wide Web has become a data-gathering electronic flea market of global proportions.

The once ubiquitous Top Forty pop radio format collapsed in the Nineties, fragmenting into a dozen demographic pieces that Clear Channel Communications was happy to buy up and monopolize. Aside from broadcasting a few music awards shows on network television, no traditional broadcaster can draw an audience of millions together simultaneously to hear a variety of music anymore. That may be democratic progress of a sort, but much has been lost along the way to the Big Brotherly digital Shangri-La that plagues us today.

Nostalgia among Baby Boomers and, increasingly, Gen-Xers, may be impelling publishers to glut the market with lightweight tomes by musicians and other members of the music-industrial complex. By contracting ghostwriters to do the heavy lifting, semi- literate or simply lazy rock stars can avoid embarrassing themselves. So what did I expect? To hope for more from musicians, too few of whom qualify as poets or even wordsmiths, seems naive of me in retrospect. Writing creative non-fiction, after all, is a mode of storytelling less suited to myth-making than is songwriting.

Good songs - like good poetry - evoke associations, whereas good prose must describe things in detail. Singers can exploit listeners' natural tendency to fill in the gaps via the miracle of imagination in a way that writers cannot. Prose is a different species of language than poetry. Effectively communicating and interpreting facts, as good journalism always does, demands linguistic discipline and a devotion to the perceptible truth that even few writers possess. Stirring emotions through symbol, sound, rhythm and metaphor - as good poets and songwriters do - is a rarer skill still.

Now that some accomplished music writers have joined the burgeoning parade of memoirists, things are getting interesting. The results run the gamut, of course, because some journalists and critics are more probing, more self-revealing than others.

On one end of the spectrum, we have Lisa Robinson's gossipy yet dull There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll (2014). Raised by leftist Jewish parents in New York, Robinson claims that she fell into writing about rock 'n' roll in the late Sixties primarily because her husband Richard was in the business. Robinson may be playing modest. After all, she had the chutzpah to pull off a career writing - on both sides of the Atlantic - as well as talking (she once hosted a syndicated radio show) about rock music.

Even so, you don't get the sense that a lowbrow gig publicizing pop stars was her dream job. Robinson's work lacks a sense of mission. Her memoir betrays a perfunctory, at times deadpan, distance from her subjects. She lacks dimension and depth when discussing even the music that moved her. This is about as engaged and profound as Robinson gets in There Goes Gravity:

"The Clash came along and musically smacked me in the face. Joe Strummer was the most exciting live performer I'd seen in ages. He was manic, hoarse, angry . . . [T]he Clash, at that moment, made everything that came before seem obsolete. This band mattered. And, as is always the case with any new music, it fulfilled a need that no one even realized was there until it was there, in front of them. Right band, right place, right time."

This string of cliches and hyperbole sounds so insincere, so devoid of gravitas, that her words just drift away. Her blasé tales of monster rockers on the road, especially Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones in the Seventies, failed to ignite anything in this reader's head. It comes as no surprise, then, when she admits that her favorite singer is Frank Sinatra, a safe retro choice beloved by dwindling millions.

Although a gifted jazz vocalist, Sinatra became a purveyor of sentimental schmaltz-pop, a musical sound that rock 'n' roll had rendered obsolete by 1965. Desperate to maintain his cool image during the post-JFK demise of his throwback Rat Pack, Ol' Blue Eyes married a much younger Mia Farrow that year. But that move just made him seem creepy.

Yes, the 80-something Tony Bennett, Sinatra's old rival, can make a Grammy-winning album of standards with 20-something Lady Gaga. But Bennett still stopped being hip circa 1963. Like the now pamphlet-thin Rolling Stone magazine that touts his and Gaga's recordings, Bennett has experienced severe artistic shrinkage in recent decades.

When will music journalists, editors and demanding fans awaken? Are we too far down the gadget-strewn road to ruin to witness a renaissance of rock-music culture? This stuff is too important to be relegated to obscure blogs and scholarly journals, where most of the serious writing about popular music has migrated. Footnoting academic enthusiasts rarely write in a way that's accessible to most rock fans.

So what was it like in the old days? Were things really any better in the Sixties and Seventies? In many ways, they were. And the saga of Paul Nelson provides the proof.

Part Two: Paul Nelson & the Hipster Revolution in American Culture (1960-72)

Spread into the mainstream by jazz players Miles Davis and Chet Baker; film actors Marlon Brando and James Dean; Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; social satirists Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols & Elaine May; and especially by such soul, folk/rock and pop musicians as Ray Charles, Bob Dylan and The Beatles, the intelligent hipster revolution represented a vital cultural metamorphosis.

Hip artists pushed America from the uptight early Fifties towards the groovy late Sixties. Exported through such cultural products as Hollywood movies, hit records and subversive books, the cool revolution spread around the globe. In his seminal 1994 study of the Fab Four, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties, British author (and onetime New Musical Express editor) Ian MacDonald presents his thesis about the social ramifications of that band's unprecedented popularity:

"The true revolution of the Sixties -- more powerful and decisive for Western society than any of its external by-products -- was an inner one of feeling and assumption: a revolution in the head. Few were unaffected by this and, as a result of it, the world changed more thoroughly than it could ever have done under merely political direction. It was a revolution of and in the common man; a revolution (as Aaron Copland, author of the eponymous fanfare, observed) whose manifesto -- its vices as much as its virtues, its losses as well as its gains, its confusions together with its lucidities -- is readable nowhere more vividly than in The Beatles' records. In effect, the 'generation gap' which opened in the Fifties turned out not to be a quarrel between a particular set of parents and children but an historical chasm between one way of life and another."

One person whose mind was blown into enlightenment by this cultural revolution was a critic named Paul Nelson. Like his hero Bob Dylan, he was a small-town Minnesotan, born in January 1936 in Warren, a remote Red River Valley town of 1,500 near the Canadian border. His father was a Ford automobile and J.I. Case tractor franchise dealer; his mother steeped him in a strict hellfire-based evangelical Lutheranism. Young Paul loved books, movies and music, but his hometown had neither a bookstore nor a record store.

Nelson started writing for his high school newspaper, turned on by journalism teacher Mary Lou Sullivan. He received a scholarship to St. Olaf College in 1954, but got expelled for anti-ROTC passivity. Already a rebel, he sabotaged his psychological screening exam for the military draft by emphasizing his folknik alienation from Eisenhower-era American militarism. Moving to Minneapolis in 1956, he soon met his fate.

In 1959 Nelson befriended a mediocre Twin Cities coffeehouse musician named Bobby Zimmerman, apotheosized in New York just four years later as the blue-eyed Jewish genius Bob Dylan. In 1960 Nelson co-founded The Little Sandy Review, a tiny yet influential folk-music proto-fanzine turned journal. The publishers eventually sold it to Barret Hansen, whose post-folkie radio-show host alter ego was the satirical Doctor Demento.

You can watch the mustachioed Paul Nelson in a 1995 interview featured early in No Direction Home (2005), Martin Scorsese's riveting documentary about Dylan's rise to fame. Nelson tells a funny story about a bizarre confrontation with the 19-year-old Dylan, who'd stolen a couple dozen rare folk records from him one weekend.

Nelson got his start in professional commercial journalism in 1962 by writing film and other arts reviews for the Minneapolis Daily Herald. He produced Blues, Rags and Hollers (1963), the first album by his friends Koerner, Ray & Glover. Paul migrated to New York City in '63, riding the crest of the Folk Revival wave by landing a job as managing editor of the authoritative folk-music magazine Sing Out!

Two years later, Nelson broke with the hidebound folk traditionalists by applauding Dylan's abbreviated electric set at the July 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Nelson's next article for Sing Out! was written just four days after that legendary performance. In a sort of personal manifesto, he explained his sudden resignation as editor: “I choose Dylan, I choose art. I will stand behind Dylan and his 'new' songs, and I'll bet my critical reputation (such as it may be) that I'm right.”

Decades later Nelson echoed his high opinion of early Dylan when discussing with Americana singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams his disdain for topical songwriting. Nelson praised "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," a topical (or so-called protest) track from The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964): “That's my favorite because he really makes you feel for that person rather than preaching at you. Those are the best kind, where you feel the person and then you feel the larger picture, as well.”

An ambitious and respected critic, Paul Nelson started freelancing for periodicals ranging from The New York Times to The Village Voice to Penthouse. He became the New York representative for Rolling Stone (RS) circa 1969, when that quasi-counter-cultural biweekly was still based in San Francisco. Nelson later served as RS's record-review editor (1979-83).

Then his career took an odd detour. He toiled as an East Coast publicist and A&R man for Mercury Records from 1971 to 1975, signing and promoting such artistically successful yet unprofitable acts as The New York Dolls. "Five good years, five bad years. The same five years," Nelson quipped. “My heart goes out to the hopeful sounds,” he said apropos of the Dolls. Nelson gave this laconic summary of his dilemma at Mercury Records: “Two rock & rollers in New York against twenty bookkeepers in Chicago.”

In a published piece about The New York Dolls, Nelson rails against the growing trend of empty corporate rock. Though written in the mid-Seventies, he might be talking about today: 

“Corporation rock & roll, wherein musicians like Bachman-Turner-Overdrive are more gray-flanneled than the businessmen who kowtow to them, is so formularized, homogenized, and impersonal it must surely cause the death of anything that is at all out-of-bounds, mythopoeic, and rebellious.”

A soft-spoken gentleman bachelor (after his 1966 divorce), Nelson chain-smoked Nat Sherman cigarillos and owned handguns. He concealed his baldness with a brimmed woolen cap and always wore tinted glasses. Nelson became a trusted friend to some of his favorite subjects, an impressive array of artists including writer Kenneth Millar (better known as hard-boiled detective novelist Ross Macdonald), musicians Jackson Browne, Rod Stewart (Paul co-authored a book about him with Lester Bangs) and the inimitable Warren Zevon.

“[Zevon] said to me at one point [in the mid-'80s] that he thought that some of the things that Paul Nelson had written about his songs were better than the songs themselves. It so struck me that a performer would say this about a critic,” notes music journalist Jim Farber. “Not only was [Nelson] the last person, I think, at the magazine [i.e. Rolling Stone] who was speaking from his own voice, but each of his writers was speaking with his own voice. Later [i.e. after 1983] it just became the voice of Rolling Stone . . . a magazine that was becoming increasingly corporate.”

In a 1979 letter to Warren Zevon, Nelson complained bitterly about the enervated state of popular music: “If rock once stood for some sort of a rebellion . . . really it now stands for complete conformity, it seems to me—outside of ten, twelve artists: Jackson [Browne], Bruce [Springsteen], [The] Clash, you, Neil Young . . . Power pop has proven to be the most dismal line of Campbell Soup cans in existence. Punk rock soon became power pop and became exactly what it was that it started out to be against supposedly.”

What kind of a rock journalist was Nelson? Avery puts it this way: “[Charles M.] Young cites Hunter S. Thompson's definition of gonzo journalism as having 'intense, demented involvement' with what you're writing about. Paul was a guy who achieved total, demented involvement with his subject matter in that piece. Paul was the true master of gonzo, if that's a definition of gonzo.”

But Nelson also suffered from terrifying bouts of writer's block, stemming from his merciless perfectionism and emotional insecurity. He felt guilty about getting sizable advances for proposed books (including one on Clint Eastwood), most of which were never delivered to the publishers. Obsessed with the songs of Leonard Cohen, Chet Baker and Ralph Stanley, Nelson listened almost exclusively to bluegrass records in the end.

He had severe limitations – even blind spots – in his taste. For example, he couldn't relate to African-American musicians and he despised hip-hop/rap music. He did at least champion many obscure white artists when he had influence in the Seventies, including Elliott Murphy, Captain Beefheart, Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, Richard Thompson, and Doug "the Texas Tornado" Sahm. Nelson feared getting arrested while traveling with Sahm as a minder/manager due to the musician's penchant for smoking cigar-sized spliffs in public.

“He was never snobbish or high-handed or pretentious about his tastes,” said novelist Jonathan Lethem, another noteworthy friend, “but he was always absolute about it. For him, if the magic wasn't there, end of conversation. But when he detected the true spirit, his persistence and patience in locating every possible manifestation was incredible . . . Paul Nelson's life was a fierce quiet drama of devotion to culture, with a run of triumphs along the way to a slow-motion tragedy.”

Nelson's final years were a sad coda to an eventful life. His last freelance record review in Rolling Stone was of a Waterboys album in 1990. He retreated from the world of rock 'n' roll in that decade, choosing to work instead as a curmudgeonly clerk at Evergreen Video in Manhattan. A haunting figure that Avery aptly describes as a sort recalcitrant Bartleby the Scrivener, the eponymous Herman Melville short-story character whose indolent catchphrase is simply "I would prefer not to."

Having sold his treasured first editions and accepted charity from friends in order to survive, a sometimes paranoid Paul Nelson declined to apply for Social Security - out of fear of being tracked down by creditors. He tried psychiatric counseling, to no lasting effect. Like his heroes Billy the Kid and Muhammed Ali, Nelson became a mysterious anti-Establishment icon to the rock 'n' roll cognoscenti.

And like his beloved fellow Minnesota-born writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, he died in obscurity, a relic of another epoch. But Nelson died alone, fending off eviction from his East 74^th Street apartment in Manhattan, in the summer of 2006 at age 70. The coroner listed heart disease as the cause of death, a condition exacerbated by malnutrition. His body was discovered only after decomposition had set in and neighbors complained about the stench.

As Mikal Gilmore, another accomplished friend and colleague, noted: “On the level of a friendship, he may well have been the purist artist I've known. I think about Paul fairly often these days, and about how deepfelt his writing was. Maybe, like Dylan, it was in those moments and places that Paul was best able to find his heart and express it unflinchingly. I can only wonder where all that went after he stopped writing.”

He died nearly a decade ago, an impoverished recluse in New York City. His story sounds incredible: the saga of a folk-music scholar turned A&R man for Mercury Records, a writer for Rolling Stone who explained his limited tastes with such eloquence and conviction that you could read him for pure pleasure. You deserve to know about him, and Kevin Avery's fine book is both overdue and unexpected.

“His writing was flinty, elliptical, and romantic, an unusual combination. He was drawn to loners and the excluded. There was something seductively hermetic about his work, an invitation to a closed room,” wrote rock critic Greil Marcus about Nelson.

“I not only accept loss forever, I am made of loss.” wrote Jack Kerouac. Nelson cites that line in a 1979 desert-island-disc tribute to Jackson Browne's album The Pretender (1976). “Every time I hear The Pretender, it makes me feel that it just might be possible to get out of this place.”

Paul Nelson shared many offbeat insights with readers, such as this suggestion about pre-concert soundchecks: “During the soundcheck, the band is perfectly relaxed, and the playing always seems to have that something extra—perhaps lacks something extra—that invariably strikes me as being more natural and private and revealing (i.e. better) than the official version. I think someone should start making live soundcheck LPs.”

Nelson's passion for good music shines through his words. In the unedited version of his ecstatic Rolling Stone review of Bruce Springsteen's 1980 album The River (alluding to a book of Walker Evans photographs of Alabama sharecropper families during the Great Depression, with a text by James Agee, the piece is headlined “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”) he offers this startling comparison:

“Both Springsteen and the Clash are morally and historically committed to the directness and honesty of rock & roll—and to what this music can mean to those whose hearts are smoldering with anger or shame. In their Apocalypse Now manner, the Clash come right out with it. [. . .] Next to Bruce Springsteen, however, they sometimes seem very innocent: they still believe in total victory.”

In his 1975 Rolling Stone review of the country & western concept album Red Headed Stranger (headlined “Willie Nelson's Phonographic Western"), Paul Nelson uses a historical reference to make his point, one that apparently had a particularly personal resonance for him:

“When Teddy Roosevelt claimed loneliness a quintessential ingredient of our national character, he hit the psychic bull's-eye, ringing up images of pragmatic pioneers, existential outlaws, and a long line of heroes who dreamt of the purity of their youth even as they drew guns to eliminate it.”

Paul Nelson deserves to be remembered - and read- by music fans. Like Bob Dylan, he was a musical expeditionary with formidable powers of expression. As Dylan said of Woody Guthrie: "You could listen to his songs and learn how to live." And now, thanks to Kevin Avery (and Paul's son Mark), Nelson's learned and instructive writing on music can be read by future generations.

[© 2015 by J.C. Mrazek]
 

2014 Grammy Awards, "Okie from Muskogee" (a backstory) & RIP, Pete Seeger

The American pop-music establishment has sunk to a weird new nadir of escapism.  The evidence was broadcast Sunday night on CBS.  A pair of French dance-music DJs who pretend to be cyborgs, the helmet-human hybrid Daft Punk, won the Grammy Awards for Record & Album of the Year.  Those pretentious pranksters refused to show their faces or even speak a single word (in any language) as they accepted the trophies.  Fortunately, there were a couple moments that almost redeemed this alienating Hypefest.  And both of them featured country artists.

The first saving grace:  Kacey Musgraves's lovely performance of "Follow Your Arrow," a country-pop song that actually has some substance & bite to it.  I'm glad she won the Best Country Album (for Same Trailer Different Park) & Best Country Song ("Merry Go Round") awards.  Musgraves's gentle composure was a welcome contrast to, say, Pink's strained aerial acrobat act.  And don't get me started on that bizarre group wedding, conducted by ex-rapper Queen Latifah & blessed by a cane-wielding Madonna.  Look, I too support marriage equality.  But I cannot endorse using cult gimmicks to score political points on national TV.  I mean, are these the Grammies or the Moonies?

The second act of contrition:  the appearance of 76-year-old Merle Haggard during a medley of "outlaw country" songs.  That nostalgic detour into humane musical territory opened with sage-angel Willie Nelson dueting with the atonal Kris Kristofferson on "The Highwaymen."  They were soon joined by Mr. Haggard & Blake Shelton, a bland young stand-in for the late Johnny Cash, whom Hag first heard onstage at San Quentin prison (New Year's Day 1959).  How touching to see the grizzled Merle play guitar while singing his 1969 classic "Okie from Muskogee"!  The opening lines - "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee / We don't take our trips on LSD" - included the first street-drug references ever in a chart-topping country song (aside from amphetamine pills, the trucker's little helper).  

To witness joy on the jaded faces of several stars in the audience as they sang along with Merle ("like the hippies out in San Francisco do") was a refreshing bonus.  But I wonder how many people at the show in LA - let alone viewers at home across the USA - knew that Merle's Okie paean is actually a shit-kicking satire?  In what music critic David Cantwell calls the Muskogee Moment (see his insightful book Merle Haggard: The Running Kind, University of Texas Press, 2013), Hag's "Okie from Muskogee" ignited a firestorm of controversy.  It was a sociopolitical phenomenon in the fall of '69, arguably the first shot in the culture wars that still divide the United States.  But the whole mess started as a harmless joke.  It's a good story, so bear with me.

The genesis of Merle's bestselling composition occurred on a tour bus in eastern Oklahoma in the spring of '69.  Haggard & the Strangers, his Californina-based backing band, were passing around a joint when the bus approached a sign saying Muskogee 30 miles.  "I bet they don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee," one of the guys quipped.  Stoned & giddy, the bandmates proceeded to riff on this theme, tossing out other taboos that small-town folks of that era wouldn't dare break:  dropping acid, organizing orgies, protesting anything.  "I bet they don't do that in Muskogee neither."  Since they all had working-class roots in hick towns, the jokes bore no malice.  

But Hag had an epiphany.  The Haggard family had migrated from Oklahoma to Merle's birthplace - Bakersfield, California - during the 1930s Dust Bowl disaster.  Now he - along with co-writer Roy Burris - turned his band's cannabis-fueled highway gag into a song that simultaneously managed (1) to express his pride in being kin to those once maligned migrants (signs in WWII-era Bakersfield cinemas directed "Negroes & Okies" to the balcony), while (2) poking fun at the patriotic provincialism of small towns.  Adding to the irony, Haggard told a reporter in the early '70s, Muskogee was about the only place he hadn't smoked dope.   

A gifted artist whose best early hits (from "Hungry Eyes" to "Workin' Man Blues" & "Mama Tried") exude a poetic pessimism, Haggard was able to craft deceptively simple lines.  For "Okie from Muskogee" he wrote:  "We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse" & "We like living right and being free."  In the recording studio he sang those lines in such a sincere baritone that only careful listeners could get the subversive subtext.  Radical folkie Phil Ochs was hip to the trick.  On his live Gunfight at Carnegie Hall album (1970), Ochs praises Haggard to a sceptical crowd before launching into a raucous electric interpretation of "Okie from Muskogee".  The lyrics' clever ambiguity makes you stop and think:  Wait a second, how can you be free when you're concerned about living right in the eyes of your neighbors?  

The song insinuates that hippies & anti-war demonstrators might, in fact, not be the enemies of decency & democracy.  The threat might actually come from the intolerant, sanctimonious citizens of Muskogee - those for whom "white lightning's still the biggest thrill of all."  Dick Nixon called them the Silent Majority, his racist ticket to the White House.  It took a restless ex-felon like Haggard to damn Muskogee with fake praise, offering a wise-ass backhanded compliment to "a place where even squares can have a ball."  

Nevertheless, the yokels - including Hooterville chambers of commerce, backslapping Rotarians & pro-Vietnam War diehards - ate up the cornpone part of the message.  But many others, including some of the emerging country rockers (e.g. Gram Parsons) who idolized Hag, were either confused or angered by it.  "Okie from Muskogee" was a minor crossover pop hit, nearly making Haggard a household name.  He'd suddenly become a populist folk hero to right-wingers.  The song even paid legal dividends:  Gov. Ronald Reagan pardoned Merle, a convicted burglar & car thief, in 1972.  

To his shame, Haggard engaged in some verbal hippie-bashing during press interviews in the wake of this career breakthrough.  He mainly objected to barefooted, longhaired freaks' allegedly poor hygiene.  Merle was understandably reluctant to bite the (square) hands that were feeding him.  Yet, to his credit, he never denied that the song was essentially a joke set to music.  He just wasn't forthcoming about its primary target.  Was it really the hippies or the rednecks?  Subsequent events indicate that Merle sympathized with the rednecks, more out of class loyalty than respect.  

By 2003, however, he had switched sides, publicly backing the Dixie Chicks in the media furor over Natalie Maine's comments blasting fellow Texan George W. Bush for his ill-advised decision to invade Iraq.  In any event, most country music fans back in 1969 missed the double-edged humor of "Okie from Muskogee."  They felt empowered by the surface sentiments, embracing the song as a celebration of small-town values, a conservative slam on the counterculture.  They responded with wild enthusiasm whenever Haggard & the Strangers played it during those days of rage when Sixties fervor was yielding to Seventies malaise.  

Hag was handsome, described in one magazine article as a cross between Audie Murphy & Warren Beatty.  In the '60's & '70s he made frequent guest appearances singing on mainstream television shows.  Like his friend & mentor Johnny Cash, Haggard also acted in a few TV shows & films.  Yet his music gradually fell out of fashion.  It was dropped from most country-radio playlists by the late '80s.  Merle is a proud loner who hated currying favor in Nashville.  Preferring to live in rural California, he continued to tour extensively as the decades passed.  Hag's catalog has long inspired other songwriters.  He has become an icon to (mostly middle-class) fans of the music variously labeled alt-country, roots & Americana.  The official national stamp of approval came in 2010, when Pres. Barack Obama bestowed the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors award on Merle Haggard.

On a lighter note, the massive popularity of "Okie from Muskogee" spawned a throng of less accomplished rhyming imitators.  Among them was Rusty Adams, whose ripoff "Hippie from Mississippi" posits parents so ashamed of their rebel son that they change the family name.  Hag's hit also led some musical liberals to answer him via song.  The best title of that bunch has to be "Asshole from El Paso" by Chinga Chavin, an obscure 1976 parody.  I'm guessing that it got little airplay during the USA's bicentennial.

Finally, breaking news of the death of Pete Seeger, folk-music master & giant among progressive activists, helps me see "Okie from Muskogee" in a new light.  It more or less fits in the tradition of witty American protest songs, beginning with the Swedish immigrant & radical-union bard Joe Hill.  Executed in Utah in 1913, Hill's irreverent "The Preacher & the Slave" promises "we'll all get pie in the sky when we die."  In the 1940s the prolific folksinger & songwriter Woody Guthrie, an Oklahoma native who inscribed This Machine Kills Fascists onto his guitar during the war, answered Irving Berlin's smarmy "God Bless America" with his generous "This Land Is Your Land."  In one verse - usually deleted in most published versions - Guthrie sings about trespassing in defiance of a Private Property sign because "on the other side, it didn't say nothin' / That side was made for you and me."

Woody begat Pete Seeger, followed by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie & countless others during the postwar folk music revival.  The circle came full with the career of Arlo Guthrie (Woody's genetic son), whose draft-dodger masterpiece "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (1967) was a long comical protest song, surpassed only by Country Joe & the Fish's "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" for popularity among hippies & Vietnam vets alike.  

The sharpest songs by the Sixties generation were frequently tongue in cheek.  At the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, for example, an ebullient Ochs performed his deadly playful "Talking Vietnam Blues."  And the contrarian Dylan declined an invitation to appear on Ed Sullivan's top-rated TV variety show in '63 because CBS wouldn't let him play "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues," a crazy sendup of anti-Commie witch-hunters.  Back in JFK's heyday the media blacklist (i.e. corporate censorship) kept people like Pete Seeger & fellow civil rights activist Nina Simone, a jazz singer, songwriter & pianist ("Mississippi Goddam," 1964), off network TV altogether.  

Smart artists know that nothing undermines tyranny, injustice, hypocrisy & pomposity as effectively as critical humor set to a catchy melody (Exhibit A:  Tom Lehrer's "Vatican Rag," 1965).  Songwriters who are both politically committed & musically talented are hardly extinct.  Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco, Billy Bragg & Steve Earle epitomize those who still dare to take on important social issues in song.  

I just wish they were more widely heard.  The World Wide Web, a medium cluttered with content & demographically fragmented, seems unlikely to launch a benign cultural revolution.  The chances of human survival would surely be enhanced by the popularization of songs saying something that truly matters.  All the better if those songs make us laugh to keep from crying along our troubled journey into the future.  

"Where have all the flowers gone?  Long time passing."  Rest in peace, Pete Seeger, who hoped that the pen is mightier than the Bomb & proved it.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott: Gentleman, Rebel, Joker & Folksinger

“I shook the hand that shook Woody Guthrie’s hand!” exclaimed the 20-something guitarist for the Drunken Catfish Ramblers outside the Stoughton Opera House on a warm Saturday evening. The San Diego-based musician, whose string trio is busking their way across America - traveling by thumb & freight car, no less - had good reason to be excited. It was September 11, 2010, a sad anniversary for the USA, but a fine night for music in southern Wisconsin. He was referring to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who was in town to entertain us with songs, stories & jokes honed over 6 decades of performing & recording.

The son of a Jewish doctor, Jack was born Elliott Adnopoz in Brooklyn (NY) in 1931. He ran away from home at age 15 to join a rodeo, but soon reluctantly returned home. In 1950 he met the legendary Woody Guthrie, who sealed Elliott’s fate as a roaming trickster-style folksinger. He established his reputation as a performer & recording artist in London (England) in the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s, Ramblin’ Jack had matured from a Guthrie protegé to a mentor for Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs & other more obscure folkies around the New York scene. He still gets around, having played a Blues Festival in Oslo (Norway) just before his gig in Stoughton, Wisconsin, a town south of Madison settled mainly by Norwegian immigrants.

Stoughton also happens to be the birthplace of the show’s opening act, Miss Meaghan Owens. A talented young Americana singer-songwriter, Owens’s sweet girlish voice, percussive fingerpicking & enthusiastic stage persona provided a good contrast to Jack’s crotchety seated performance. Dressed in a fancy white-and-pink cupcake dress above cowboy boots, the petite redheaded Miss Meaghan played 5 songs, mostly from her new CD Gun Shy of a Kiss (available at her website, www.missmeaghanowens.com). Owens seemed nervous & a bit awed by the grand venue, but the crowd encouraged her with generous applause. She remarked on the contrast between the hushed, gilded Opera House & the loud, dirty honky-tonks where she usually plies her trade. The highlight of her set was its opener, “Saturday Girl” (co-written by Nashville veteran Bobby Hicks), a catchy melody with plaintive lyrics about a neglected lover’s yearning. Owens will open for Junior Brown at Shank Hall in Milwaukee on September 25th.

Ramblin’ Jack took the stage almost shyly, despite his rather flamboyant outfit: pink cowboy shirt, brown kerchief, blue jeans, boots & a broad-brimmed hat. Warming up with “San Francisco Bay Blues,” he played his guitar - which featured a longhorned steer painted below the sound hole - in his customary flatpicking style. He paused between numbers to tell funny stories about some of his famous pals (Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Townes van Zandt, Willie Nelson, et al.) as well as various roadies & broncobusters he has befriended. He interjected a tall tale or two, including a claim that his husky/sheepdog mix Caesar could drive a car. He embellished the story by noting that the unlicensed canine “was the best road manager I ever had.”

At age 79 Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s tenor may be shaky & strained, but his repertoire is deep & wide. The songs he performed in Stoughton ranged from cowboy ballads (“Buffalo Skinners”) to talking blues (“Talkin’ Sailor Blues”) to Carter Family classics (“Engine 143”), to Woody Guthrie protests (“1913 Massacre”) to cosmopolitan country (“Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain”) to old-timey tunes (“Rakin’ & Ramblin’” - made famous by North Carolina banjoist/folklorist & lawyer Bascom Lamar Lunsford) & even pop hits of the 1960s (Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter”).

A solid interpreter of others’ compositions as well as a purveyor of ever-evolving folk songs, Ramblin’ Jack is refreshingly modest & self-deprecating. He can also play the cagey put-on artist à la Dylan. “I’m not a music lover,” he told us with a deadpan expression. “I just do this for cat food and diesel fuel.” I only wish his LA record label hadn’t neglected to supply him with CDs to sell at his concerts. After apologizing about that & complaining that the label had “dropped the ball,” Jack took it in stride. “It’s only money,” he said stoically, “it’’ll show up soon.”

Polite, snow-haired Jack doffed his cowboy hat several times during the concert & thanked us all for coming. A rebel as well as a gentleman, Mr. Elliott may have disappointed his parents (who’d urged him to be a doctor), but he rarely disappoints an audience. In fact, he’s a kind of alternative healer, bringing the medicine of laughter & the wonder of music to stressed souls well into the 21st century. Long may he continue to ramble!