Classic Paste: The Best of Issues 16-18 (June - November 2005)

It's not exactly paradise. In fact, it’s Nashville—if not Hell, then at least Purgatory—where an aspiring songwriter lurks deep within the heart of every waiter, longing to be set free, and where stardom is only a Stetson hat and an open-mic night away. But for John Prine, the gravel-voiced veteran songwriter, it’s home. And these days, almost 35 years after his stunning debut, it’s a home filled with unexpected joys and pleasures.

“My boys are nine and ten now,” Prine says. “And I do what every proud parent does. I go to Little League baseball games. I attend the school functions. And when I tour, I leave on Thursdays and return on Sundays to make sure I can be around during the school week. It’s not the most exciting life. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.” ...

All respect to Mac Montandon for collating these disparate magazine and newspaper articles and broadcast interviews into a seamless read, but it’s the man and his myth that are the main attraction. Tom Waits is a liar: “I’m going to pull your string from time to time,” he understates to Playboy in 1988. But his lies are truer than most people’s truth, and in a bravura performance spanning four decades, Waits’ derelict koans astound, delight and disturb. Even when paired with talented journalists, he quietly fills all the space in the room without ever fully appearing—he’s always shambling late into his own narrative and vanishing when the check arrives. The interviewer kills time with the standard introduction—a blur of tail-finned cars, whiskey and Naugahyde, long fingers worrying the brim of a tattered porkpie hat, rumpled seven-dollar suits and smoldering squares. Eventually, the door creaks open and a pointy shoe portentously enters the frame. Waits eats soup, rambles with casual brilliance and he’s gone.

Waits’ entire life unfolds in this chronologically arrayed volume, and like all tall tales, alternate versions orbit the truth with such complex trajectories that they become indistinguishable: Waits was born in the back of taxicab or a truck (probably neither); he only smokes Viceroys, Kents, Chesterfields. As a child he longed to be an old man, walking with a cane for style, listening to Harry Belafonte records with his friends’ fathers. It’s often reiterated that young Tom had hypersensitive ears, hearing sounds like Van Gogh saw colors—garish, intense and frightening—and would repeat little nonsense mantras to himself when the world got too loud. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting omen for the music he would one day create. ...

Issue #18

"The Rural Studio: Architecture that Empowers, One Building at a Time" by Andria Lisle

Racists were made here. Bull Connor, who unleashed police dogs on civil-rights protesters marching in downtown Birmingham; Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, who dropped a stick of dynamite into a black church one Sunday morning; and Governor George Wallace, who preached “segregation now, segregation forever,” showed Alabama’s ugly side, which Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and the Selma Marchers sought to overcome.

But in rural Hale County, Ala., conflict and conscience intersect. Here, in the late 1930s, author James Agee and photographer Walker Evans embarked on their legendary social experiment—living with sharecroppers and documenting their plight for a magazine article, which eventually expanded into the incendiary tome Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Here, in the ’60s and ’70s, artist William Christenberry traveled the roads of his grandfather’s farm, turning tenant houses into abstract paintings, photographing children’s graves and measuring local structures for carefully wrought dioramas. ...

"Cameron Crowe: The Road to Elizabethtown" by Tim Porter

It’s day three of sound mixing for Elizabethtown, and deep inside Hollywood’s Universal Studios, the Alfred Hitchcock dub stage buzzes with activity. Cameron Crowe and his nine-member team fine-tune the movie’s “very fragile” airport scene, bringing the music up here, taking the footsteps down there, swapping Orlando Bloom’s “um-hum” for an “ahh” to make him sound less cynical. In the midst of this, Crowe and his associate producer Andy Fischer juggle other urgent matters. Over the phone, song clearances are negotiated, screenings are scheduled and taglines are debated with the studio (Crowe worries that one of them belittles Kentucky, so he cuts it from the list). Low’s Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker drop by to take in the proceedings. Midday, Crowe is told to expect a call from Van Morrison and to act surprised. “It’s not normally this crazy,” Crowe assures me. (When I return a couple weeks later and Fischer tells me the same thing, I start to question what normal is for them.) 

Even though he’s been suddenly thrust into seven-day workweeks to accommodate Paramount’s new deadline, Crowe still has to break from mixing and drive across the studio lot to film a personal welcome for European screenings and promos for online trailers. The room breaks into laughter as he does take after take of “exclusive clip” intros, merely substituting one website for another. Leaving the shoot, he apologizes. “I’m sorry you had to see that. I can’t believe how hard it is to stand in front of that camera. I go right back to the mirror in the junior-high locker room, and you just hate everything you see and you want to be the other person.” ...

"On the Bus and off the Record, 'It's All Happening' for My Morning Jacket" by Reid Davis

In the midst of a fitful sleep somewhere between Buffalo and Cleveland on Interstate 90, I wake to the sound of wine and liquor bottles crashing. In the wee hours of the morning, the driver of My Morning Jacket’s tour bus has made a sharp turn, and the contents of a slippery counter in the vehicle’s forward lounge have smashed to the floor. 

I groan, but avoid rolling over (only one position—the back—works for sleeping on a moving bus.) And I decide not to get up to survey the damage; I’m on the uppermost bunk and in my groggy state will surely step on someone if I climb down. 

Unless you count a pre-show screening of Badder Santa, this is about as decadent as it gets touring with rock ’n’ rollers My Morning Jacket. Earlier in the evening, I was ushered to my bunk and handed a blanket and pillow—not by the band’s road manager—but by Jim James himself, the band’s leader and sole songwriter. And the next day, at a homecoming show in Louisville, Ky., band members’ parents, siblings and old friends (including the members of another noteworthy Louisville band, VHS or Beta) would mob the backstage area. 

I may be on the road with one of director Cameron Crowe’s favorite bands, but this certainly isn’t Almost Famous (though I keep expecting to see Russell Hammond and Jeff Bebe standing alongside the road, hoping to thumb a ride after they’d kissed and made up at a Jacket concert). To quote Penny Lane, “it’s all happening” for My Morning Jacket, but it’s happening musically. ...

"A Paste Conversation: Paul McCartney Walks the Fine Line Between Chaos and Creation" by Brent Dey

When he left The Beatles, Paul McCartney retreated to a country house with his wife, kids and personal recording equipment to produce McCartney I—an album of odes to “home, family and love.” No longer a Beatle, Paul was free to indulge his sweet tooth, which he did with saccharine classics like “My Love,” and “Silly Love Songs.” 

By the mid ’80s, Paul’s sugar had turned to sap. A string of lackluster albums eroded his fan base to the point that his recent output—including the Beatlesque Flaming Pie and a fine collection of 1950s standards—has largely been ignored. Undeterred, McCartney has continued to explore, embarking on his ambitious Standing Stone concerto and releasing ambient techno mixes under his Fireman moniker. 

Though they may not be as groundbreaking as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or have the same nostalgic appeal as Rubber Soul, McCartney insists these new records are all part of the same trip. “It’s like sort of stepping on a train,” he tells Paste. “I don’t worry about other trains I’ve been on, just this new train, and that’s exciting. You just have to realize that perhaps you can’t always have as great a journey as you had in the past.” ...

"Making the Fantasy Band" by Curt Cloninger

A great band is always much more than the sum of its parts, which is why supergroups cobbled together from individual all-star musicians are rarely that super. The greatest bands are formed when individual spiritual forces mysteriously coalesce to birth an entirely new collective personality (Band with a capital B). Author William Gibson even has a name for the particular personality that is Steely Dan’s Band: “Mistah Dan.” When Walter Becker and Donald Fagen reformed after their long hiatus, Gibson was listening to see if Mistah Dan would show up again in the studio; and indeed, there he was. 

As inheritors of the “artist as hero” paradigm, we’re wont to place a lopsided emphasis on solo virtuosity. Take a capital B Band like U2. Legend has it that in the beginning, U2 didn’t know who was going to be the guitarist and who the lead singer. “How can this be?” you ask, “when The Edge is so obviously a world-class guitarist and Bono so obviously a world-class vocalist.” But they grew into their roles in the shared context of the larger Band. 

So when I decided to create my own hypothetical supergroup, I needed a twist. I couldn’t simply create a supergroup of virtuoso musicians. Bill Bruford will not be on drums. Stevie Ray Vaughan will not be on guitar. Jaco Pastorius will not be on bass. Billie Holiday will not be singing. None of the members of Rush will even be mentioned. ...

"Them's Fightin' Words: A Tour of American War Fiction" by David Langness

I spent 14 months in I Corps, Vietnam, as a conscientious objector combat medic; like every grunt I vowed never to forget after seeing too many guys eat the Big One. When I came home I began searching out, collecting and obsessively reading every piece of American war literature I could beg, buy or borrow. Unlike Gustav Hasford, though, I didn’t steal any. 

Hasford—that wacky ex-Marine Gus, who authored a couple of hot-rod, hellacious, hallucinogenic Vietnam novels (one of which, The Short-Timers, became that gentle, affectionate date movie, Full Metal Jacket)—subsequently did three months in the slam for checking out 748 war books from various libraries and forgetting to check them back in. The Hasford website (gustavhasford.com)—the only place you can still read his remarkable novels (except libraries, ironically)—calls him “the guy who paid the greatest fine ever levied in the written history of library science.” 

I swear I bought all my war novels, your honor. Then again, I only have about 500 of ’em—a piker compared to Hasford, God rest his soul. Gus told me once that he braced a wavering New York publishing executive by telling him, “I ain’t one of your wimp-ass Algonquin Round Table intellectuals, pus-face. I’m a Marine. I’ll permanently nail a piece of the world to your head.” ...

Review of Björk's Music From Drawing Restraint 9 by Jason Killingsworth

Björk doesn’t get off on being regarded as pop music’s eccentric aunt. Or, in the minds of her less-charitable detractors, its half-mad spinster living with her 50 cats in an abandoned lighthouse and sleeping two hours a night because she’s busy hobbling up and down the seashore, yelling obscenities across the dark tide and rubbing fistfuls of wet sand into her armpits. Though she finds amusement in the mythology that’s grown up around her, I doubt she savors the knowledge that many listeners regard her stubbornly idiosyncratic art as somehow contrived to be weird and even willfully unsettling. 

Björk does, however, love music desperately. And her definition of music is frustratingly vast—world-swallowing even. Because, in fact, that is precisely what it does. Her art devours ethno-musical traditions from around the globe, organic sounds plucked carefully from nature, synthetic textures belched up by laptop computers; in short, a sphere of inexhaustible nuance. But while your average listener tends to measure the worth of music by its structural logic and melodic accessibility, Björk simply wants to know: What’s the emotional payload? Can you taste it on your tongue? Does it tickle at the base of your spine? ...

Review of Blackalicious' The Craft by Brian Howe

Blackalicious' new album opens with a manifesto, "World of Vibrations." And while some of the song’s lines get lost in Gift of Gab’s caffeinated flow, he’s clearly attuned to the challenges facing Blackalicious in the aughties rap milieu. Check defiant (plaintive?) turns like, “And stay metaphysical / And challenge what is really real / And keep creating with the force to bring rap back / Not that it’s away but everybody got something to say / So let me speak the opposite of what’s hot now.” Should we read this as a courageous stand against the spinning moral compass of modern rap? Or as a rapper lashing out in fear against a zeitgeist that threatens to render him obsolete?

Blackalicious is definitely a throwback to rap styles of yore, falling somewhere between A Tribe Called Quest’s suburbia-approved beatnik-hop (both in its lyrical bent toward social conscience and its sculpted, content-laden beats) and the prolix word-trickery of ’90s indie rap. It wasn’t so long ago that such stuff could nestle comfortably on commercial radio alongside spiritual brethren like The Roots.

But here in 2005, the year of chopped-and-screwed crunk; brittle, alien grime; starkly repetitive club rap; and the “I ain’t a rapper, I’m a hustler who raps” denaturing of MC-as-artist, metaphysics don’t get much play, and it’s hard to imagine Chief Xcel’s lush palimpsests of funk, soul and jazz breaks spanning the gap between the minimal lockstep of The Game and Slim Thug. The implicit danger in speaking “the opposite of what’s hot now” is that no one will listen, but on The Craft, Blackalicious sidesteps this pitfall by maintaining the essence of its increasingly dated style while making small yet vital concessions to modernity. ...

Review of Ry Cooder's Chavez Ravine by Jeff Leven

Field recordings of plantation blues or even doo-wop records from studios long shuttered always carry with them some patina of place and time, a certain sizzle in the analog static or a warm heat from adobe walls that seeps into a fretboard. When you hear it out of context, as some orphan on the radio airwaves, you can’t quite figure out the story of what this stuff is or where it came from, but on some more subliminal wavelength, it tells you something about itself. Ry Cooder’s genius is that he takes these cues as a challenge to explicate, lay bare—and, at his best, recapture—some of the meaning just outside the frame of three-minute 45s long lost to legend. The plot only gets thicker with a story like that of Chávez Ravine, a neighborhood lost to history, much like Cape Town’s District Six. Chávez Ravine’s story is not just one of social displacement, but the hint of the layers that sit, often invisibly, beneath our feet in every modern city. 

Cooder’s Chávez Ravine could’ve been a long, dry, pedantic history lesson but instead it’s the kind of exploration that’s both satisfying and scholarly in its ability to bring to life stories, times and places that are literally underfoot but dangerously close to being forgotten. Imagining the world of Los Angeles at the dawn of the 1950s, the protagonist alien (the spaceship kind, allowing for the obvious metaphor of course) hears an old Little Julian Herrera recording and goes looking for the scene, only to find that the neighborhood he seeks was bulldozed to build Dodger Stadium. Lovingly packaged with the photos used by Don Normark (whose book remains the definitive history of the vanished neighborhood) and a running commentary from Cooder, Chávez Ravine is as weighty as it looks and feels. ...

Review of Dar Williams' My Better Self by Andy Whitman

Political diatribes in the music world have grown tiresomely commonplace these days. There’s a coarse symmetry to the proceedings: Toby Keith wants to kick the asses of all the bleeding-heart liberals, Steve Earle wants to kick the asses of all the warmongering conservatives, and everybody else wants to bludgeon anybody who happens to maintain an opposing ideological stance; an eye for an eye, a spiked middle finger for a spiked middle finger, and a rock ’n’ roll screed for a rock ’n’ roll screed. In such a highly charged atmosphere, Dar Williams’ My Better Self—as politically minded as any album released in the past year—arrives as a soothing, self-aware lullaby that actually manages to generate some light in the midst of the heat. 

Williams has always been a fine writer with a highly idiosyncratic, frequently humorous lyrical bent. Her first album contained a song that mentioned Ronald Reagan and Sid Vicious in the same line, and she’s made a career out of such quirky juxtapositions. This time, however, she’s opted for a much more straightforward, less-ironic approach, both when she’s addressing issues of global importance and when she’s baring her soul in full late-night confessional candor. ...

"Rearview Mirror: Playing With Dolls" by Hollis Gillespie

I was nine when I first found Jacqueline Susann in my mother’s bed, but that wasn’t unusual. I’d also found Mario Puzo in there a few times, and Satan, and dirty ashtrays, and once an electric toothbrush. My mother’s bed was not a very comfortable place, to say the least. Still it was her favorite place to read, even when I was there, too, twitching and affecting all the symptoms of an adolescent possessed by the devil (which happens when you have a nine-year-old in the house and you leave the book The Exorcist lying around on top of the covers).  

But it was Susann’s Valley of the Dolls I remember most, probably because I read the whole thing, as opposed to select passages I’d heard about in junior high. At first I just flipped through the pages looking for sex scenes, but since there were so many I ended up reading it from jacket to jacket. The book was, of course, impossible to put down. Who can forget the cover art? That single image of a juicy human mouth—disembodied and slathered in scarlet lipstick, its perfect teeth biting down on a barbiturate. ...

Review of Joe Carducci's book Rock and the Pop Narcotic by Dave Sims

In 1990, Redoubt Press released Rock and the Pop Narcotic like a shot of Raid into a hornet’s nest of received wisdom and unquestioned assumptions about the Meaning of Rock, unleashing a buzz of critical hosannas, unqualified opprobrium and everything in between. Joe Carducci’s 500-page missive is the work of a true iconoclast, sporting the kind of smart, cranky prose that made the likes of Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches such a joy to read in the heyday of the Noise Boys. Simon Reynolds called it “a riveting blend of rigor and dry wit.” Rock historian Clinton Heylin included not one, but two excerpts in his Penguin Book of Rock and Roll Writing, remarking, “Rock and the Pop Narcotic ... may well be the most important critique on rock music written in the last 10 years.” Many who objected to Carducci’s aggressively right-wing libertarian slant, and liberal (illiberal?) use of such inflammatory epithets as “fag” and “faggy,” grudgingly acknowledged the force of Narcotic’s whiplash style, which can move from scatological dumpster-diving to ivory-tower theorizing in the same sentence, all the while weaving together a near-exhaustive Grand Unified Theory of Rock. (GUTR? I like that.) With the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind just one year after the book’s initial publication, Narcotic’s advocacy of guitar-based hard rock seemed not merely “important” but “prophetic.” ...