The Rocket Must Dock in the Hall of Fame

I spy the neon glow of self-appointed sports writer "saints" like Jeff Passan.

In 1919, a jury acquitted “Shoeless” Joe Jackson of conspiring to throw the World Series. Nonetheless, the following year Major League Baseball’s first commissioner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, banned Jackson from the game and he remains ineligible for the Hall of Fame. Both decisions rankle diehard baseball fans and the second is considered a travesty. Why bring up ancient history? Because we may see something akin to it next year when Roger Clemens becomes eligible for induction to Cooperstown.

On June 18, a criminal trial jury handed down not-guilty verdicts on six counts relating to Clemens’ alleged use of steroids. Already, sportswriters such as Lew Carpenter, Jeff Passan, Wally Matthews, and Tom Verducci have insinuated that they and their peers hold higher standards of innocence than the jury. In their minds, Clemens’ name in the discredited Mitchell report trumps the findings of the jury. In other words, they’re prepared to play the modern-day Landis role and deny Clemens election to the Hall of Fame. To this I reply, who died and made you guys Pharisees? By what objective standard can they deny him? To mangle a phrase form the O. J. Simpson trial, if the jury acquits you must elect.   

Is Clemens worthy? Well, if 354 wins, 7 Cy Youngs, a MVP award, an ERA of 3.12, election to the All-Century team, and 4,672 strikeouts aren’t enough, nothing is. No one will ever get the warm fuzzies when they think of Clemens, but the man’s practically a saint when compared to his chief accuser, Brian (“The Juice”) McNamee. Besides, if being a nice person was a criterion for the Hall of Fame, they could clear the joint and rent the space to U-Haul. There is far less reason to deny Clemens than Shoeless Joe, who actually admitted he took money from gamblers (though he didn’t throw the World Series). The goods on Clemens are even shoddier than those attached to Pete Rose (who should also be in the Hall of Fame).

It’s beyond risible that a group of sportswriters would set itself up as moralists and judges. I double-checked; there are no baseball writers–an aggregate known to contain quite a few substance abusers–who have attained sainthood. If there are any former Eagle Scouts among them, they outgrew those virtues long ago. Want to talk about being morally compromised? Every sportscaster attached to an affiliated network swallows truth on an everyday basis because he (or the occasional she) knows that being overly critical will result in dismissal. Beat writers covering teams also follow restraints, lest they be denied easy access to the players and other sources necessary for them to file stories. Are we to believe, for instance, that no New York sportswriter ever saw Mickey Mantle or Whitey Ford drunk? Would Jeff Passan, in his Kansas City days, have written a slam piece on George Brett? Do you expect the Boston press to spill the beans on how thoroughly unlikable Ted Williams or Carl Yaztremski were? What passes for “tough” reporting is a shadow of what is actually witnessed.

So spare me all that “integrity of the game” nonsense, and stuff that “Clemens is a cheater” mantra. No–he’s not; a jury has ruled on that. You may have your private suspicions, even your deep-seated certainties, but there is no objective basis upon which Clemens can be denied entry into the Hall of Fame. Maybe the dude did steroids; maybe he’s as pure as Snow White. All we know for certain is that a lot of guys did use steroids between the 1980s and 2002. Most of them were hitters. Only one pitcher, Clemens, won 354 games. Sounds like an even match to me. Like it or not, a jury says that though his name appeared among the 47 steroid users listed in the Mitchell Report, Roger Clemens is an innocent man. The Rocket must go to the Hall of Fame. To keep him out would be worse than Shoeless Joe’s ban; it would be ideological- and innuendo-based persecution analogous to McCarthyism.

Rob Sez: We Need a New Woody

David Lutken as Woody Guthrie 

I recently drove to Cambridge to an American Repertory Theater production of Woody Sez, a musical about the life of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (1912-67). This show has been kicking around since 2002 and is definitely one you should catch if it appears anywhere near you.

David Lutken plays Guthrie, and he has a fine sense of Woody’s wonderment and temperament. When Lutken twinkles his eyes, gazes upward, and puts on an Oklahoma draw, he transforms himself from actor to sage philosopher. (Guess it comes naturally. He’s not an Okie, but he grew up in Dallas; he’s also played Will Rogers on stage.) Frankly, Lutken sings and plays a whole lot better than Woody did.

The latter is one of many those looking to poke holes in Woody Sez can find. The play sanitizes Guthrie, starting with his physical appearance. Lutken appears in a clean work shirt and khaki pants; Guthrie–who was a Dust Bowl hobo for quite a few years–was known for being disheveled on a good day. In fact, his poor hygiene was legendary even among his closest friends. In like fashion, the show also glosses Guthrie’s irascibility and irresponsibility, viewing them as occasional bouts of crankiness lurking within a noble soul. There was indeed a principled core to Guthrie, but the man was also a lousy husband, an absentee father, stubborn as a mule, and as dependable as a Yugo.

A few other flaws: Darcie Deauville is a terrific musician, but an occasionally sour singer (unlike Helen Jean Russell and Andy Teirstein, fine interpreters of old-time music). It would also help to review Guthrie’s bio before you go. There are only four actors on stage and the “play” is more of an operetta. There is minimal dialogue–often a “Woody Sez” spoken segue–to cement a biographical sketch that also includes snippets from 33 songs in just over 90 minutes. The actors, except Lutken, play multiple roles at the drop of a hat. (They also play a dozen different instruments.)

Yet the darn thing works. The telescoped life and repertoire acts as a sort of Whitman’s Sampler and makes one appreciate how much Guthrie crammed into a short life. No one knows how many songs Guthrie actually penned–we’re still unearthing them–but though it’s seldom realized, Guthrie’s active career spanned fewer than 20 years. He was struck by Huntington’s chorea in the late 1940s, and spent more time in the hospital than he did on the road. 

Here’s the other thing Woody Sez invokes: a sense that too many of today’s musicians wallow in narcissism and/or isolation. Name a prominent post-1975 protest song singer. Had to think about that one didn’t you? They exist, to be sure, but whose modern repertoire quakes with songs of moral outrage such as    “Jolly Banker,” “Do Re Mi,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Vigilante Man,” or “The Ballad of Tom Joad?” Who even remembers that “This Land is Your Land” was a protest song written to blow the rose-colored glasses from the faces of kneejerk patriots crooning “God Bless America?” (Check out the lyrics no one sings: http://www.arlo.net/resources/lyrics/this-land.shtml ) And how many of today’s look-at-me singers would live among ordinary folk, crash in hobo camps, pick fruit with migrant workers, or walk the picket line? Many contemporary musicians proudly proclaim their apoliticism, a pronouncement that would have sickened Guthrie’s generation (Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Paul Robeson, Lee Hays…)

Guthrie did those things. He also emblazoned his guitar with the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists,” spoke truth to power, and reveled in making songs simple enough to sing. (He once said, “Anyone who is using more than two chords is just showing off.”) He warned us that some men rob us with six-guns and some “with a fountain pen.” His advice for the bellicose? “Plenty of rich folks wants to fight. Give them the guns.” The pious? “Love is the only God that I’ll ever believe in.” It’s as if he anticipated today’s music when he said, “I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my songs and to sing the kind that knock you down farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you've not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that.”

Rob sez, we sure could use a new Woody Guthrie. --Rob Weir

unHun

African Blues Lifts the Soul

VARIOUS ARTISTS

African Blues

Putumayo 317-2

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Call this one the sequel to Mali to Memphis, the 1999 project spearheaded by Taj Mahal in which American blues artists traveled to Africa to discover their roots. African Blues largely migrates in the opposite direction; that is, African artists explore American styles. The ensemble Mali Latino opens the collection with “Ni Koh Bedy,” but don’t expect Malian guitar and Carib swing; the sexy, soulful organ licks on this are straight out of Booker T. and the MGs. Diabel Cissokho and Ramon Goose check in later with “Totoumo,” which sounds like the intersection of kora music and Ry Cooder. By contrast, Amar Sandy’s “Camel Shuffle” has the muscularity of electric Chicago blues, and the collaboration between Playing for Change and Tinariwen on “Groove in G” is a psychedelic/blues mash that ought to come with its own light show. You’ll also hear echoes of Delta blues, introspective jazz grooves, Memphis blues, and others. Make no mistake–this is not Africans playing American music. A quick listen to the chant/drone quality of the vocals of “Alam’i” dispel such thoughts. But everyone is clearly having a good time. Taj Mahal checks in with a guest turn with the Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar. The song is called “Dhow Countries,” but it’s what Barry White might have done with a plane ticket to Africa.

Check out the world blues of “Groove in G: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LQhamwJcVY Very cool stuff indeed. 

Pleasant Street Theater Closes

Death of a Theater

I needed a little time before writing this and, even now, the sadness lingers. Last weekend I attended the final screening at the Pleasant Street Theater in Northampton, Massachusetts. Its closing came on the heels of two other shockers, the demise of Pleasant Street Video, and the decision to discontinue nightly movies at the Academy of Music. For the first time in over 100 years, there is no movie house in Northampton.

Intellectually I understand that tastes and technologies change. Spiritually I grasp the reality that life itself is transitory. The Buddhists call it anicca, the notion that nothing is permanent. I tried my damndest to immerse myself in the tributes and memories shared by former owners and patrons of “P Street,” as we locals dub it. Despite my best efforts, the celebration felt more like a wake.

Americans like to take solace in two ideas: that change is desirable, and that we live in a world in which the march of history is a constant uphill trudge from primitive to positive progress. We take solace, but I doubt we really believe either of these things as much as we say we do. I’m no Luddite-–How could a Luddite even write a blog?–but I just don’t see the age of the iPad, video-on-demand, and Netflix as an improvement over places like P Street. Spin it as you wish, but in my mind the closing of the Pleasant Street Theater is nothing less than a tumble down Progress Hill and an impoverishment of art, community, and the spirit.

I concede that P Street had issues–it needs new projectors, it’s not handicapped accessible, and the downstairs space­–optimistically dubbed the Little Theater–had a tiny screen, poor sight lines, and so many uncomfortable seats that a lot of folks preferred their widescreen TVs to sitting down there. I know that it would take more to improve P Street than the cost of knocking it down and starting anew. I also confess to being a romantic who is a bit out of touch with modern preferences. In Generica (my term), most viewers like those standardized mall boxes, not P Street’s funky brick-walled ambience. They like blast-the-eardrums wrap-around sound, not quirky equipment that needs tweaking; they want seats that tilt, not wobble.

For all of that, I still think that film ought to be a public event shared with friends and family and discussed at cafes after the screening, not discrete experiences viewed in private living rooms or soul-sucking malls. Art is, above all, a shared heritage, not an act of solitary cultural masturbation. The death of small theaters correlates with the impoverishment of art. One of the things that Generica does is narrow our scope, options, and vision. P Street’s final film was, appropriately, a screening of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 masterpiece “The Last Picture Show.” I saw it right after watching Fellini’s “Roma.” I saw the latter on DVD, so I guess that makes me a bit of a hypocrite, but the larger point is that without venues such as Pleasant Street it’s unlikely I would ever heard of either film. Each is everything Generica is not–experimental, offbeat, and provocative. Each elevated art over commercialism. “The Last Picture Show” is even in black and white, for heaven’s sake, and don’t get me started on the ways in which Fellini films would never pass TV muster. (The nudity alone would kibosh them.)

Why should we care? Check out the bland fare offered at your local mall and you have your answer. Is that level of flabbiness and mindlessness all that we want from that once-robust and diverse entity we call American culture? In theory, of course, one can get anything on video, as I did with “Roma.” Ah, but this where theory meets reality. We all know the adage “Out of sight, out of mind.” We repeat it because it’s true. One could request any of a number of films, but how does one learn of their existence? Reviews? How often do you read a review of something not appearing in your area?

Small venues like the Pleasant Street Theater expanded our horizons by exposing us to filmmakers who waded outside of the mainstream. They challenged us, made us think, and opened doors we would have otherwise never approached. They didn’t show “movies;” they showed “films” and, yes Virginia, there is a difference–a world of difference. Here in Northampton, our world just grew smaller and less interesting. --Rob Weir

A Tribe Called Red Raises the Innovation Bar

A TRIBE CALLED RED

A Tribe Called Red

Soundcloud.com

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And now for something completely different…. What would you get if you mashed up three Native DJs (NDN, DJ Shub, and the deliciously named Bear Witness), some Native voices, a roomful of electronics, and a postmodernist/post-tribal imagination? It would probably sound a bit like A Tribe Called Red, and I’ll be damned if they’ve invented a label to describe it, though they call it “Pow Wow Step.” It’s heavy on loops, drums, keening, and electronica, but other influences pop in as well; “Shottas,” for example, has clear reggae roots. The label is called Soundcloud, which is apt for the experimental soundscaping done on each of the eleven tracks. “Red Skin Girl,” for instance, has piercing, primal female screams mixed amidst scratches, and electronic bleeps and beeps; “General Generations” loops echoed historical and modern voices and serves them from an electronic soup bowl; and “MoombahWow” is rave-meets-pow wow. Hip-hop, club, and dance beats are in evidence throughout, and form the staple of weekly performances in Ottawa, where the ensemble is based. As innovation, production, and spectacle, this is fascinating stuff. At eleven tracks, though, it may be a bit too much for the ears when taken from its club context. But here’s the best part: You can try it for yourself; the entire album can be downloaded for free at www.electricpowwow.com

Rob Weir

No "United" in the United States

Several years ago I had dinner with Dick Gaughan, a Scottish musician acquaintance. (That’s pronounced Gawwk’n for those of you who are Scots-impaired.) Dick, an old lefty, led off the conversation with the provocative remark, “The United States is breakin’ up, lad.” Not to be outdone by another’s glib remark I retorted, “Really, Dick? I’ve not seen the memo.” Don’t mess with the pros; Gaughan came back with this gem (assume a Scottish accent): “Seriously, man. You’re from Massachusetts and I’m from Scotland, but I’ve just come from Texas and I you and I have way more in common than you have with anyone in Texas!”

Gaughan was right; aside from the occasional system shocker such as 9/11, there is no such place as the United States of America. The USA is a repository of atomized individuals, special interest groups, clashing ideals, and regional variations masquerading as a nation. There is nothing that unites us other than the U.S. dollar–no ideology, no shared values, no mutual concerns, and certainly no common god. On the latter score, I must admit that I don’t give a damn what happens in Bible Belt regions such as South Carolina or South Dakota. In my heart of hearts, I sincerely doubt God would have ‘em if the Rapture they await actually happened!

The only thing wrong with Gaughan’s claim is that it lacked perspective. Our current red state/blue state rhetoric is merely a public acknowledgement of what has long been the case. Back in 1981, the year Reagan assumed the presidency, journalist Joel Garreau published The Nine Nations of North America, a frothy little volume that broke down the continent into regions that shared values and culture. He correctly identified, for instance, that northern Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire were part of greater Quebec, just as much of the Southwest and southern California belonged to “Mexamerica,” and “Dixie” was a nation unto itself. 

Fast forward to 2011, the year writer Colin Woodard published American Nations. Garreau’s study was mostly sociological in nature; Woodard’s contribution is historical. He notes that there really never was a United States. From the outset, settlements in the Chesapeake, Deep South, Appalachia, the New Netherlands, and New England were more different from each other than from their parent nations. The American Revolution served to magnify, not obliterate, those differences, and Manifest Destiny merely added greater diversity. In Woodard’s telling, what we call the United States is an abstraction based on two events of great symbolic (but mythic) importance: the Revolution and the forced repatriation of the Civil War. Moreover, he argues that Garreau was overly charitable; there are eleven distinct regions, not nine. (See above map.) I have quibbles with some of Woodard’s borders–I’d include most of Eastern Canada in an entity I’d dub Greater New England, for instance–but he’s just as right as Gaughan; the United States is an abstraction rooted in myth and sentiment, not reality.

This brings me peace of mind concerning the upcoming presidential election. I think it very likely that Mitt Romney will win–and by a comfortable margin. Such a prospect would have distressed me in the past. Romney is a despicable man; he’s a smug, dishonest, dissembling, rapacious venture capitalist whose values lay on Wall Street and the Cayman Islands, not Main Street or Rhode Island. He will be a Mormon version of George W. Bush who will pack the Supreme Court, gut personal liberties, dismantle Obamacare, line the already gilded pockets of robber barons, and send young folks off to foolhardy wars.

So why am I not worried? Because Romney will do it all of this in the name of a phantom, the United States. I don’t live there; I live in Massachusetts (or “Yankeedom,” if you prefer). We’ll still have gay marriage, free speech, reproductive rights, state healthcare mandates, labor unions, and weekly protests against every damn war Romney concocts. We’ll also be way better educated and have far higher wages than the fools in Greater Appalachia, the pious and pompous in Dixie, or the libertarians in the Far West. That’s because we’re really Canadians at heart, which is what we’d be politically in a world in which logic ruled rather than inertia and myth.

Here’s the memo: The United States doesn’t exist.

Mountain Project Merges Nepali and Bluegrass Music

VARIOUS ARTISTS

The Mountain Music Project

Mountain Music MMJ 2614

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The challenge of all concepts is to translate vision into accessibility. In 1983, The Chieftains proved that Western and Asian musicians could make beautiful music together. The Mountain Music Project seeks to expand the idea. Producer Danny Knicely operates from the assumption that hills are hills, whether the mountains are the Appalachians or the Himalayas; that it makes no difference if a wooden flute comes from Ireland or the Himalayas (bansuri); and that fiddles are fiddles, whether they are finely crafted, or roughly hewn from a chunk of wood and finished with a sheath of goatskin stretched across the chamber (sarangi). He then gathered American bluegrass and Nepali musicians and told them to make mountain music together.

The results are mixed, though it’s no fault of the musicians from Nepal’s musical Gandharba caste. On The Mountain Project, the Nepali musicians (Buddhiman, Manoj, Jagat, and Ganesh Gandharba) do a better job of upholding their traditions than some of the Americans do with Appalachian songs. The instrumentals are so good on both sides of the divide that one can instantly hear why Danny Knicely and Tara Linhardt conceived the project. Buddhiman Gandharba’s raw sarangi notes and vocals on “Sita Rani Ma” are a perfect parallel to Tim O’Brien’s yearnful “Going Across the Sea;” both sing and play their fiddles as if they were the lost grandchildren of Tommy Jarrell. Put them together on a song like “My Home is Across the Blue Ridge Mountains” and the synergy is even more obvious. Bring in some more Yanks–Curtis Burch (dobro), Mark Schatz (bass), Tony Trischka (banjo), and beautiful sounds meld. And the producers were right about the flutes; either Jagat Gandharba’s bansuri or Aaron Olwell’s Irish flute fill the aural spaces nicely. I wish the same could be said for all the singing. I don’t know the vocal work Knicely or Ricky Baugus well enough to say whether the recording is badly balanced or if they are weak singers, but I can say that what we hear on this album gets overwhelmed by the mix. Bottom line: hills are hills, but not all vocals are created equally. --Rob Weir

Check out the very crisp trailer from the related film project.