Listening to Lange...

Hip-deep in some recent books relating to the Great Depression--the first one, I mean, not our on-going "Grim Regression"--I am offering here for the moment my own slight tribute to the astonishing, hauntingly beautiful, era-defining b&w photos taken by those artists working for the W.P.A. in the early Thirties: Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein and, of course, Dorothea Lange.

So: an encore presentation of my Lange dramatic monologue/ballad poem... but this time I'm adding photos that should enhance it a lot:

Ballad for Dorothea

I saw the plow that broke the Plains
break on dust and “drouth.”
That’s what the people called it,
a word as dry in the mouth

as a farmer’s thirst. Or his curse.
That damnable dearth of rain
dried up the land, growing
crops of nothing--but a harvest of shame




when bankers foreclosed on families
who’d seeded the earth with their bones,
raising up an army of the homeless
I held in the lens

of my eye long enough
to let the pure
light within them burn this country
a way to a truer future.



I couldn’t think of them as migrants,
or Okies, like some, because I’d
seen the dusters come rolling and boiling,
blotting out the sky,

till a one’s hair and tongue and dreams
were all the same dark smudge.
To me they were refugees,
even the ones that held on and didn’t budge.


Those black blizzards ate the sun,
and I traveled through the towns,
the tent camps and Hoovervilles,
seeking with my lens

to tell the folks’ hard stories
without leaching their pride.
That was my strength: I could look
and not seem to be looking; I could





















see the split-seconds that would
document lives—that bitter old man
with his cup, turned away
from the breadline; one

lone worker, his wheelbarrow dumped over,
head down and back against the wall… Yet
truth to tell, I suppose
I never quite caught



those broken farms on film.
How I envied Rothstein his glorious
shot of the man and his sons
leaning into the dust

storm! I was better focused
close on people: mothers and children
in tarpaper shacks, towns
fly-specked with aimless men,



whole families packing the roads.
Displaced persons everywhere I looked,
their faces streaked
with the dust they couldn’t lose. The Joads

were just folks I’d met;
I as much as snapped the photos
for John’s novel. Still, I don’t know
what they thought.





















Times we’d talk, they weren’t what
you’d call articulate. Uneducated,
most of them, and shy.
But with hearts that could reach the sky

above the Great Plains. I
never knew a one of them to grovel,
or even ask for pity.
I loved them all





















the only way I could—
I hugged them with the camera.
But I don’t see as how
my caring made any difference.

So many years now,
and the moneyed are still in control,
the homeless still search for cover.
I’ve come to believe we’re all,





















poor and rich, wandering in ignorance;
refugees, on a road the dust blows over.

Tom Russell: Darkness Visible

Lately I've been listening to more folk/ roots music than anything else, and I've found four artists who speak more directly to me than the popular, maybe better-known performers do. I suppose it's partly a matter of age, because these four songwriters are closer to my 67 years than, say, Ben Harper or Ani Defranco or Whosit. All four are well-regarded here in the U.S. and highly praised in Europe. I've already written (here) about Dave Alvin, ex- of the great roots rock band the Blasters; and another of the four needs no publicity from me (hard-living, late- and still-lamented Townes Van Zandt), so I'll focus some attention on the remaining two, stubborn Westerner Tom Russell in this post and New Orleans r&b guitar master Chris Smither (sometime soon).

Russell has been at it since the mid-Sixties. In fact, a recent post on his personal blog talks about having an encounter with Bob Dylan back in '62 or so, and knowing then and there what he wanted to do with his life. His success came slowly, but by the early Eighties other performers were recording Tom's songs--Joe Ely, Nancy Griffith, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Dave Alvin, Tom Paxton, and Johnny Cash all discovered his music. In the meantime he was recording for Philo and then Hightone, and nearly every album from those three decades is a gem. But a trio of his most recent releases provide a good summation and intro: Veteran's Day: The Tom Russell Anthology, a 2CD set on Shout Factory, sampling his best songs from those two defunct labels; One to the Heart, One to the Head, by Gretchen Peters, with Russell duetting and producing, on Scarlet Letter/Frontera Records (in 2008); and Tom's latest, 2009's Blood and Candle Smoke, also on Shout Factory.

There's a well-known Northwest poet named David Wagoner, who in his heyday seemed to find poems in everything: old shoes, getting lost in the woods, baseball games, croaking frogs... you name it and he'd write it. Russell has some of that world-embracing, eclectic, encyclopedic intelligence; his storytelling songs draw on the cowboy past and the confused present, historic happenstance and misterioso modern moments alike. So in the two-set you find wonderful originals devoted to Japanese-Americans interned at Manzanar, the sad death of Bill Haley, Vietnam veterans, pre-Katrina Mississippi floods, careless horsethieves caught and hung, Little Willie John's cellmate, a handy Navajo rug, Mickey Mantle, fighting cocks in Mexico, Charles Bukowski, a border patrolman in California's unexpected snow, a statue in Lyon, France... and that's just a third of the 37 tracks on Veteran's Day.

Tom's fondness for high-energy folk-rock and chiming guitars (mostly courtesy of longtime pal Andrew Hardin), mariachi and Tex-Mex backgrounds, memorable images and muscular language, are all well represented, his past as amateur boxer, carney roustabout, sometime cowpuncher, and semi-pro adherent to the stripped-down style of Hemingway and Raymond Carver subtly present too. Listen to this 2CD set, and I'll bet you want more.

Gretchen Peters is a Nashville-based country singer/songwriter, but she grew up out in Colorado and a few years back she and Tom linked up somewhere, with Peters providing background vocals on some Russell tracks. And Tom was immediately convinced she should cut a modern Western album, which is how One to the Heart got recorded. The two put their heads together and assembled a terrific array of new and old Western songs with a suitably autumnal feeling and arrangements favoring piano, accordion, and cello more than guitars--Mary McCaslin's beautiful "Prairie in the Sky" and Rosalie Sorrels' proud farewell titled "My Last Go Round," the cowboy tune "Old Paint" and Dylan's border-flavored "Billy 4" (from his soundtrack for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), Ian Tyson's sad and lonely "Blue Mountains of Mexico" and Nan O'Byrne's comically rowdy, not-precisely-cowboy original called "Sweet and Shiny Eyes."

Three others elevate the album beyond excellence to secure classic. Townes Van Zandt's "Snowin' on Raton" receives a gorgeously simple guitar-and-piano arrangement, with Gretchen and Tom trading verses and harmonizing a slightly lengthened chorus, repeating the simple, hypnotic lines "Snowin' on Raton, Come mornin' I'll be through these hills and gone." Meanwhile, the puzzling title of Peters' album comes from a number (written by several women) which addresses directly and angrily male abuse of women; its title "If I Had a Gun" tells you that the later line "One to the heart, one to the head" comes with a snarl and a promise of violent revenge. A cowboy song? No, but a modern "murder ballad" for sure.

Finally, Russell provided a new song for Gretchen and himself to share, the wonderful, spirit-comforting original called "Guadalupe," depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe shrine and miracle story of Juan Diego seen anew through the eyes of a troubled penitent, and sung first-person as if truly being experienced by Gretchen (or Tom, in harmony). The lines are haunting, questing, amazing. Here's a sample:

There are ghosts out in the rain tonight
High up in those ancient trees
And I have given up without a fight
Another blind fool on her knees...

She is reaching out her arms tonight
And, yes, my poverty is real
I pray roses shall rain down again
From Guadalupe on her hill

And who am I to doubt these mysteries?
Cured in centuries of blood and candle smoke?
I am the least of all your pilgrims here
But I am most in need of hope...

I have to admit that this beautiful song strikes a chord in me, the first time I've ever been made curious about Catholicism and saints and miracles. And the performance anchored Gretchen's CD so remarkably that when Tom released his own Blood and Candle Smoke a year later, he revisited their duet and picked an alternate track or shaped a different mix putting himself in the lead (making it the album's title source too). With Russell's wounded baritone throughout, a later verse takes on new meaning:

So here I am, your ragged disbeliever
Old doubting Thomas drowned in tears
As I watch your church sink through the earth
Like a heart worn down through fear...

But the earlier duet was a musical miracle not to be supplanted by his own doubt and guilt, however heartfelt.

Russell's songs are quite literate, even literary, sometimes more like short stories or spoken word recordings, as he cites in passing--or builds whole songs around--Mother Jones, Nina Simone, Hank Williams, Joseph Conrad, J.D. Salinger, Graham Greene, Picasso and John Donne and Tennessee Williams. But this is not just namedropping; the references are usually surprising but apropos and add welcome depth--until his later CDs have come to seem chapters in some grand Encyclopedia of America, evoking Nature despoiled ("Santa Ana Wind" and "Mississippi River Runnin' Backwards"), his own wild past in Nigeria and Canada and Mexico as some strange code for U.S. meddling around the world ("Criminology" and "East of Woodstock, West of Viet Nam"), and carnival craziness as greater metaphysical exemplar, found in "Darkness Visible" and "Don't Look Down," the latter including this packed verse:

Oh, the rhymes of the ranges,
And the kindness of strangers
I have run all the changes
Of the Chickasaw waltz
Tasted lipstick and nylons,
Seen your mental asylums
Turned my back on that violence,
Before I turned into salt...

Even the music this time roams farther, offering not just folk guitars and Tex-Mex excitement, but odd percussion and drifting arrangements involving members of the musical cooperative Calexico/Giant Sand (Joey Burns, John Covertino, and others) and ex-Box Top keyboards whiz Barry Walsh. Gretchen Peters adds harmonies as well.

I could blather on for several more paragraphs, but I'll skip to the chase--the remarkable track titled "American Rivers," which pretty much includes all the points about Russell's songs I tried to make earlier: personal remembrance, history and politics, pollution of Nature, satirical references, surprising tenderness. Let Tom's own words suggest his role in roots music:

In an old Chinese Graveyard, I slept in the weeds
When a song and a story were all a kid needs
Yeah, the rhymes and the rattle of those runaway trains
And the songs of the cowboys, and the sound of the rain

And it's mama I miss you, I woke up and screamed
American rivers roll deep through my dreams...

With their jigsawed old arteries so clogged and defiled
No open-heart miracle will turn 'em back wild
Past towns gone to bankers; past fields gone to seed
All cut up and carved out; so divided by greed

And old grandfather Cat Fish with whiskers so long
And his life in a struggle, 'cause the oxygen's gone
Oh, mama I miss you, I woke up and I screamed
The American rivers, they've poisoned my dreams

Colorado, Allegheny
Shenandoah, Sus-qua-hay-nee
And the Wabash, the Hudson, the brave Rio Grande
I was a kid there, asleep in the sand, near your Waters...

Of Bootlegs and Blogging

I'm lucky to have lived through the birth and early growth of Rock Music's bootleg records--1967 to 1980, approximately--back when the Mafia hadn't yet muscled in to press counterfeit copies of real albums, and the artists themselves were often amazed and flattered and happy to cooperate somewhat in the release of such collectable stuff.

Back then, it was understood that any bootleg collector was also a big fan who'd buy anything the artist recorded, whether released as an industry product or a private label swipe. The records were pressed in limited numbers and sold openly in certain alternative-style, hippie-driven stores, and there weren't that many releases at first.

If we ignore the Forties/Fifties tradition of beyond-legal (re)issues of unavailable Early Jazz discs (at first still as 78s, then later gathered on 12" LPs), the first Rock era bootleg was a two-record set issued in 1969 in a plain white jacket completely devoid of text, with blank white labels as well. The set was loosely identified as Great White Wonder, and playing it revealed four sides of previously unissued tracks and unknown songs by Bob Dylan: a variety of studio outtakes, hotel room tapes, live-in-club performances, and demos of tunes offered to other artists, two dozen numbers ranging from "Dink's Song" and "Ramblin' Around" to "Tears of Rage" and "The Mighty Quinn." The tracks weren't uniformly excellent, and sound quality varied widely, but to have them issued at all was both feat and treat, offering splendid fare for collectors and Dylan fans.

I guess the set must have sold well because soon other (and better) Dylan albums appeared, and then other artists showed up too--the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin--and in no time the levees were breached and the floodgates broken wide: live concert tapes and obscurities galore by the Who, Neil Young, David Bowie, the Dead, and other Sixties faves, followed soon by a whole new branch devoted to Bruce Springsteen alone, and then Jackson Browne, Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, the new Fleetwood Mac, the Clash and the Sex Pistols, on and on.

There were a couple of excellent underground companies like "Trademark of Quality" (with its pig symbol and jacket covers featuring artwork by brilliant comics artist William Stout); but there were also crappy fly-by-nighters who just bootlegged, poorly, other labels' boots, and--still later--legitimate above-ground industry careers for one or two of the ever-anonymous master 'leggers!

Several major artists actually climbed on board, allowing high-quality tapes to slip out to the "fans," and a few even issued their own official boots. (Decades later came the legal Dylan series that continues today on CDs.) Bootleg album packaging kept getting fancier and fancier, until a buyer could easily be fooled into thinking s/he was purchasing a legitimate release.

But, really, what had begun as a service to fans, and a relatively harmless promotion for the performers, somehow had grown immense and become a giant sub rosa industry involving a few thousand different albums and hundreds of thousands of dollars--worrisome revenue totals not going to the bypassed record labels and original artists. Investigations were launched, warehouses and pressing plants raided, serious fines and jail terms slapped on anyone caught selling any sort of bootleg. (Elvis Presley, meaning Colonel Parker, and RCA were especially virulent and aggressive; one bigtime bootlegger, based in Florida as I recall, got 20 years.)

The fun went out of the game. Too much grief awaiting buyers and sellers. Too much shoddy product. Too many choices with no open discussion possible to help determine which discs were worth owning.

Like many others I stopped buying... until CDs came along and revived the whole thing all over again, resulting in new high-quality discs, more serious collector material unearthed, and many stores again selling them almost openly--for example, major stuff appeared from the always-indefatigable Dylan, including a five- or six-CD set offering the complete Basement Tapes of Bob and the Band, which shamed Columbia's mid-Seventies two-record sampling... I've succumbed to a few of these new-era issues, but I'm cautious.

Who wants the hassle? Let the younger fans track down boots of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Throbbing Gristle and REM or whoever. The collector fun's pretty much gone for me. I guess I'll just stick with the now-historical gems I was able to accumulate 40 years ago--samples of which are illustrating this very pictorial post.

Delray Beach, Sort Of

Spaceholder this week...

Just back from Florida, from the Shults family gathering--with Ludwiczaks too, and extended-family Maxwells and Stalneckers--convened around father Richard's lamented passing (see post below). But he got a grand send-off indeed, from Funeral Mass at the favored Catholic Church, to official Reception at a posh Holiday Inn restaurant, to several reunion parties with all ten kids (well, all of them are aging adults now), and spouses, and some of their children present too, ranging from 23-year-old blonde bartender Ashleigh down to six-months-old, new-kid-on-the-block Blake.

West Palm Beach, Highland Beach, Delray Beach... wind and rain, sand and sun, we roamed the Southeast Florida retirement/vacation strip. And a great good time was had by all, even widow and proud matriarch Peg.

So the sad occasion became serendipitous and magical, brimful of love and joy. Glad I got to go along as daughter Sandra's happy partner (albeit worse half).

Sergeant Shults

My wife's father died recently. He was a good guy. He was also a lawyer for 40-some years. (Go figure.) Here's a part of his story:

Richard Hinch Shults was a lawyer and a gentleman, and one of America's "Greatest Generation." Born November 1, 1921, in Batavia, NY, Dick was the son of dentist Nicholas Justin Shults and Mary Francis Hinch (a master bridge instructor). He had two younger sisters, Gracia Maxwell and Peggy Stalnecker, and both eventually played unforeseen roles in his adult life. Gracia introduced him to Mary Frances ("Ro") Best, who became his wife in 1948 and then mother of their six children. And years later, when Ro died suddenly in 1971, sister Peggy provided a crucial assist...

Decades before that, Dick had graduated from Batavia H.S. (in 1939), then attended Holy Cross University--where in addition to academics he showed a mastery of bridge strategy, ping pong, tennis, and pool. Following college graduation in 1943, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, hoping to become a pilot in the Army Air Corps. Having "too many teeth" (as he put it) kept Dick from the skies; and years later he told his children that it must have been God's plan, because many of his schoolfriends who made pilot were soon killed in combat.

Dick instead joined the 970th Counter Intelligence Corps assigned to the European Theater and tasked with hunting Nazi Party members who had disappeared back into Germany's general populace. As he later wrote in a letter to one grandson, "One of the places I was stationed with the CIC was Heilbron, Germany, and my job was to search for the leaders of the German underground movement and make sure they were locked up in prison so they could not rekindle the Nazi organizations..."

As an investigator Dick definitely earned his Sergeant's stripes. Among his many spy-novelish adventures: for a time he ate lunch daily with an informant who kept the CIC apprised of which prisoner soldiers were Nazis and which regular German Army. Dick also helped uncover and quash an armed insurrection planned by Hitler Youth, and he interrogated Party members whose information was used to support the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials.

Inspired by these experiences, after his discharge in 1946 Dick attended Columbia Law School on the G.I. Bill, becoming a lawyer in 1950. He was licensed in New York State and Washington, D.C., too--where he was asked to join Clark Clifford's firm. His many assignments there included an odd one: delivering by hand a Christmas gift of personalized golf balls to President Eisenhower at the White House!

But a couple of years of politically oriented law proved to be enough. Dick moved his growing family back to Batavia in 1954, and became a partner in the small firm Kelly and Shults, with a practice focused on real estate law. Over the next many years Dick also served as a public defender (often bringing his young clients home for dinner), and later as an elected city judge. From the time in Batavia, the children recall his many meals at the "animal clubs" (Elks and Moose, that is, and he was a big tipper all his life), his fondness for coffee ice cream, and his daily routine of Air Force exercises performed in his pajamas.

After the death of Ro, father-of-six Dick reconnected, through sister Peggy, with past friend Peggy Ludwiczak, who was herself a widow with four children then living in Cherry Hill, NJ. The two families joined forces in 1972, and quickly blended well, as would be attested today by the combined ten and their own descendants: Sandra, Deborah, Richard, Margaret, Robert, Joseph, Thad, Christine, Rita, and Amy--and their 21 children and five grandchildren. (When Dick proposed, he promised that "Our life will never be dull." After several months of marriage Peg remarked, "Couldn't we have a little dullness?")

The economic recession of the Eighties prompted moves first to Pennsylvania, then to Oklahoma, and finally to Florida, where Dick passed the State Bar Exam at age 63 to support those few Ludwiczak-Shults family members still attending college.

First in Boca Raton, and then Delray Beach, sunny Florida allowed Peggy and Dick to enjoy many good years--new friends, lots of bridge, and cocktails on the patio each evening. (Dick's secret to successful martini making and consuming: add a little water to the gin.)

They were able to travel to the Caribbean several times and to Europe for their delayed honeymoon (Italy, France, and England), and later to Ireland where they visited the grave of Dick's grandparents, the Mahers. (Earlier trips with the kids--grown children later--included many summers spent on Long Island, rambles to Yosemite and Banff, the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Rockies, and grand family reunions in several East Coast cities.)

Dick took down his law shingle for good in 1997 and, finally, this year, his life shingle. He will be greatly missed by that big double family, and all his friends, and the strangers he helped along the way.

Jack: The Crack Up

A few days ago I posted my account of a recent quick trip to San Francisco, and I chose Jack Kerouac's Big Sur novel as a related visual. Taking my paperback copy down from the shelf and skimming the first few pages persuaded me that I should also reread it.

The very next day, by cosmic/karmic/Kerou(m)ac coincidence, at the CD store I came upon a new two-disc set titled One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur, which offers a CD of the soundtrack music--composed and played by Jay Farrar (of the band Wilco) and Benjamin Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie)--plus a DVD of that documentary, about Jack circa 1960 and his harrowing stay in a tiny cabin close to the booming Pacific south of Monterey, which in turn led to his writing the Sur book. Wheels within wheels... (A suitable image given "Ti Jean" Jack's paean to crosscountry hitching and driving, On the Road.)

Farrar's inspired idea was to take chunks of the book and set them to guitar-based music, shaping a dozen songs which provide another window into the names-changed memoir-novel, even though only a few of them wound up in the finished film. But for any fan of Farrar (or Gibbard), the disc is as compelling as that surprising cooperative venture some years back, titled Mermaid Avenue, when Billy Bragg and Wilco teamed up to create new songs from unused lyrics by Woody Guthrie. The Kerouac songs have titles like "California Zephyr," "Breathe Our Iodine," "These Roads Don't Move," "Final Horrors," "Sea Engines," "The Void," and so on; and the titles alone suggest the sometimes lyric, more often paranoid, passages in the book--which chronicles Jack's alcoholic retreat from too much fame and success and his temporary hallucinatory collapse.

The documentary--by Kerouac Films, with Jim Sampas (a familiar surname in the saga of Jack) as Executive Producer and Curt Worden as Director--is simply brilliant. Gorgeous high-definition photography of San Francisco and the Monterey Peninsula, a voiceover reader who sounds very much like Jack (maybe it is him, though one John Ventimiglia is listed as "Narrator"), on-camera interviews with writers and critics, actors and rock musicians and SF street-scene people, all of whom knew Kerouac or were influenced by his work. The result is a craftily constructed, cautionary tale of what happened to Jack and his chums during those few infamous weeks and how that story metamorphed into the novel he called Big Sur--considered his best work by some, however unlikely given the huge cultural impact of On the Road, but certainly Jack's last great book (even though followed by a good dozen posthumous, pulled-together tomes, popping up like tombstones for Ti Jean).

Among the distinguished commentators, who by the way do not sound stiff or academic at all, but boisterous and admiring and speculative and insightful instead, are poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti (owner of that primitive cabin) and Michael McClure, eccentric rockers Tom Waits and Patti Smith, actors Sam Shepard and Donal Logue, folkies Dar Williams and Jay Farrar himself, authors Aram Saroyan and S.E. Hinton, even Kerouac-haunted women Joyce Johnson and Carolyn Cassady. The film drifts and surges like the Pacific, pauses then dances on; and it all goes by in the wink of a splendid summer's eye.

Maybe best of all, I'd say that One Fast Move is eminently suitable for repeat viewing. And anyone who screens it should also play the chunks of interviews offered as extras, unused because not specifically about Big Sur, but rollicking and entertaining additions to the Kerouac story nonetheless.

Left in San Francisco

When the crammed, cramped United Airlines flight landed Thursday evening at San Francisco International, the sky was dumping buckets, and our aquaplaning cab ride was essentially a surfer's dream. "Oh no," we groaned, during that 10-mile water-slide, "another getaway cursed by the whims of the weather gods..."

But the next morning was merely misty, and each day thereafter breezier and clearer--until by Sunday we were able to join the sun-cheered thousands spending the day at Golden Gate Park.

Friday had been our day to view the amazing Cartier exhibit at the Legion of Honor Museum, displaying over a hundred years of bejeweled, over-the-top tiaras and diadems; baubles, gold bangles, and sapphire beads. The exhibit was, sensibly, mostly aimed at a female audience. Sandra was happy to stroll and marvel, but I had hoped to see more samples of the firm's Deco era work--especially since my own unusual wedding ring is based on a unique commissioned man's ring Cartier made in the late Thirties, the massive original of which I saw in Venice 25 years ago. (The photo shows my smaller, less pricy, adapted version of Cartier's 24-carat gold, platinum-spike Machine Age marvel--which I've not found in any books about the jeweler.)

We dined that night at John's Grill, a San Francisco landmark offering old furniture, aged steaks, and new Jazz (a strong solo guitarist whose name I failed to register), plus a big photographic emphasis on Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, which mentions the restaurant favorably.

Day Two's weather looked promising, so I postponed hitting the Book Fair, and instead we headed out to wander the edge of bustling, celebratory Chinatown and then the "Little Italy" of North Beach, as well as the far end of the cable car lines--chomping a terrific pizza for lunch, and browsing for a couple of hours at City Lights Bookstore. No sign of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, sadly, but I was able to pick up several books and brag to the disinterested clerk that I'd visited City Lights for the first time way back in the summer of 1959, when I was a teenager pretending to be Beat.

San Francisco's many hills (I overheard one guy say there are 22 of them!) looked splendid in the wind-blown, in-and-out sunshine, and riding the cable cars was great fun. We dined at Ducca, a fine Continental bistro located right in our Market Westin Hotel.

Sunday morning dawned clear blue, and I agonized for, oh, about 30 seconds before deciding I'd rather spend the day with Sandra, exploring more of the city, than hole up indoors for the final day of the Fair. (Oh well, our home already houses hundreds of collectable books, and I'm intermittently selling them off.)

So we boarded a round-the-city, two-decker tour bus that visited the painted Victorian houses prior to depositing us at the new museums and resurrected De Young buildings at Golden Gate. Rain forest displays, the new aquarium with amazing coral reef, the classic Japanese tea garden, hundreds of bicyclers and 5K runners and a limousine-styled shuttle that carried us all around the Park and all the way out to the far-West, edge-of-the-ocean beach, were the highlights that made our last day most excellently special.

We flew back to Seattle that evening well-citied and -sated. I blew off the Book Fair, you say? Well, yes; I plead tourist madness, resurgent Beatness... and marital bliss.

'Frisco? Not in Kansas.

We're... off to see the Wizard...

Well, no, not really. As the Plains ranchers and sodbusters used to say, "We're going to see the elephant." Sort of.

Once that would have meant a trip to St. Louis or Chicago, to the wonders of some far-off big city, but today it's Sandra and me heading for a weekend getaway in San Francisco, celebrating a birthday, an anniversary, and a-whole-nother year of marital bliss-und-blitzkrieg. (Just kidding.)

As Dorothy observed, wandering the streets of 'Frisco, "Gee, Toto, there's no place like home... here. We must be back in Oz!"

Actually, we're heading to the annual San Francisco Book Fair--as wondrous as Oz--plus what promises to be a major exhibit of Cartier treasures, and several memorable meals (one hopes), and the fogbound city to stroll and cable-car in... But I'll have to pass on the frantic clubbing, unless we find some good Jazz.

Anyway, no blogging this week. Silence is golden. (Or maybe yellow brick road-ish.)

Three to Get. Ready?

From the ridiculous (see previous post) to the sublime...

Almost every fan of pop music (or jazz, or blues, or whatever genre) has his or her special favorites--not the big worldwide hits that every listener knows, and not the lesser albums by major artists, but those unknown works that seem like secret messages no one but the single lucky listener has discovered, brilliant works created by little-known performers laboring in obscurity.

No doubt someone will nominate a particular disc by Mink Deville, for example, or soulman McKinley Mitchell, or pop band Blue Ash maybe (I might on a different day), but I'm thinking at this moment of three other LPs, all dating from the late-Sixties/early Seventies. Two of them are actually underground classics in some circles, praised by "those in the know," while my third choice may cause some raised eyebrows--but, hey, I know a classic album when I hear it!

First up is that deft last one, dating from 1973: Loving & Free by Brit vocalist Kiki Dee, produced by Elton John as part of his private label (Rocket Records) deal with MCA, but better than many of Elton's own releases from that period, thanks to the canny selection of tunes (two by hit masters John/Taupin and four gems written by the singer herself), the use of several top English sessionmen (Paul Keogh and Davey Johnstone on guitars, Dave Mattacks, Gerry Conway and Nigel Olsson on rock-solid drums, Elton himself on keyboards, etc.)--and the wonderful white-soul vocals of Ms. Dee. John continued backing Dee on subsequent efforts too, shaping her hit single "I've Got the Music in Me" and then duetting beautifully with her for the massive hit "Don't Go Breaking My Heart," but it was her debut album that received the most loving attention, and subtler production too.

Elton found a variety of ways to support Kiki's warm and caressing voice--a smidgin of Mellotron and sax, a couple dashes of organ or pedal steel, some elegant strings (on two tracks only), and Elton John-styled piano almost everywhere else. But Dee and her sweet & soulful backup singers (including Lesley Duncan) had no trouble floating along or rising above each--hear "If It Rains," "You Put Something Better Inside Me," and "Sugar on the Floor" for the proof; and the latter two are just as warmly sexy as their titles suggest. Elton's piano kicks "Lonnie and Josie" like a sequel to his sorta-Western album Tumbleweed Connection, and Jackson Browne's "Song for Adam" gets a gorgeous, rhythm-spiked makeover. And there's room for some tougher rockers too--a blues-hot redo of Free's "Travellin' in Style" plus the fun, Elton-fueled, faintly generic "Supercool." But the lady will melt your cold, cold heart with her harmonized vocals on the post-coitus "Amoureuse" ("Strands of light upon a bedroom floor") and her title-tune original:

"Bound, I am bound like the knots in a string,
Eager to be where my life can begin.
Out of the shadow and into the sun,
So many things I should have done...
I will untangle myself,
So that I can see;
I will untangle myself,
Everything will be
Loving and free..."

Second of the three is the best Bob Dylan album that Bob didn't participate in, meaning Lo & Behold, the great homage-to-Dylan disc by Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint--English sidemen and session dudes ex- of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and the Manfred Mann group (he helped produce) and other fine bands--offering a dozen Dylan songs that hadn't yet been taken up by Bob or others, gleaned from demos and the readily bootlegged Basement Tapes. (There were only ten tracks on the 1972 Lo & Behold LP, but the current CD has added two B-sides from singles, plus an alternate mix, so the version shown has 13 cuts total.)

Ironically the CDMF versions often are better than those sloppy-casual ones Bob and the Band laid down in the basement. Dennis Coulson has a good strong voice, and the guys together (with some extra session help) play 17 or 18 different instruments, enriching the arrangements nicely. Some tracks are still jokey ("Open the Door Homer," "Odds and Ends"), while others remind us of Dylan's plainspoken protest days ("The Death of Emmett Till") and soon-to-come religious time ("Sign on the Cross," which starts out strong and then builds inexorably to a seven-minute gospel shout).

There are two stunningly beautiful numbers that manage to turn musician-as-troubador images into something unique, going beyond ordinary love songs--"Eternal Circle" ("But my song it was long, And there was more to be sung") and "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" (acapella lead and chorus, then harmony with on-rushing piano and electric guitar: "And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings No voice can hope to hum"). Blending English brass band, music hall jollity and a round-singing quartet of voices, "Don't You Tell Henry" is a wonderful one-off... but given a run for its money by the rollicking, off-beat arrangement (spiked by "Susie Q"-styled cowbell) of title track "Lo and Behold."

Yet most exotically impressive of all (to my ears) is "Let Me Die in My Footsteps," another of Dylan's then astonishingly neglected songs; but the CDMF version not only rescues an overlooked masterpiece but presents it as some sort of East Indian rocker with distant vocal, semi-sitar (electric guitar strung loose, it sounds like) and pseudo tabla drumming, those played respectively by lead men McGuinness and Flint, who deserve a big tip of the hat. It's a damn shame there was no sequel to this brilliant album.

Finally, going back 50-some years, first there was Vince Martin with the Tarriers, briefly, then there was the duo of Martin & Neil, princes of Greenwich Village, then it was Fred Neil in the ascendent and Martin in eclipse, escaping to Florida. And then--hosanna!--for one glorious, unique moment in 1969 there was Martin's out-of-left-field (actually Coconut Grove via Nashville) LP, If the Jasmine Don't Get You... the Bay Breeze Will, the best folk-rock-country-jazz-raga album ever issued--still almost totally unknown today, a small-print sui generis footnote in music history.

Seems a group of Nashville cats (Kenny Buttrey, Charlie McCoy, Lloyd Green, Norbert Putnam, Henry Strzelecki, and two or three others) had just spent several days showing Dylan again how the professionals worked (shaping the stunted Nashville Skyline just as some of them had earlier built both Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding); and right then into town came producer Nick Venet and reclusive Vince to work on something that might reintroduce Neil's ex-cohort to the world. (Martin & Neil together had sounded fine partly because their duets came up from below, Fred's bass-to-baritone voice meeting Vince's tenor-to-baritone. Fred supposedly attended the new sessions but chose not to sing.)

The players were hot and Martin gruff-edged and cool, and the results were purely amazing--great instrumental jams on both familiar tunes and quickly invented originals, with Vince singing, scatting, soaring, and sailing free, smoother and less spacey than, say, Tim Buckley. Inexorably rolling tracks like "Snow Shadows" or the gentler, guitar-sweetened "Summerwind," both powerfully sung Martin originals; a train-time reinvention of "Danville Girl," associated with Jimmie Rodgers long ago; free-flowing longer numbers, "Yonder Comes the Sun" (instantly swept up into the currents of music) and the 13-minute title cut, with the musicians refusing to give over and Vince caught up and bound to keep roaming too, on into a kind of folk/jazz/raga--the bubbling bass and streaking guitar solos simply brilliant... Indeed every cut acoustically balanced, richly nuanced, distinctly unique, well-nigh perfect.

I've bought a half dozen copies of Vince's masterpiece over the many years, and given each away to friends; and the response every time was a stunned "Wow!" Do yourself a favor... find the current CD of Jasmine, and then hoist sails with Martin ("like a wild bird flyin' blind") and those Nashville cats ("play smooth as country water"); let the salt air ("Talk about the bay breeze!") and the scent of jasmine and the acoustic country jazz take you away.