Tag: music

Hugh Masekela passed last week, and it seemed there was far too little said about one of our time’s great musical masters, his brave stance in politics, self-exile from South Africa and energetic international advocacy for political change and against apartheid.

Masekela was a talented trumpeter, singer, composer and band leader. He made great music throughout his long career, knew and worked with some of the greatest artists of the African diaspora (and others: check out his interplay with Roger McGuinn on the Byrds So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star). His compositions reflected the lives of labor sojourners and migrants who struggled for dignity and a living in brutal systems of exploitation and degradation; his trumpet playing was spirited, lyrical and transcendent. You can read more in his Wiki or on his official site.

I first heard his music on a juke box at a University of Pennsylvania hang everyone called the Dirty Drug. They had his huge 1968 hit Grazing in the Grass, but I liked the funky flip better, Bajabula Bonke. I saw him in 1990 along with 50,000 other enthusiastic Atlantans when he played for Nelson Mandela’s U. S. Tour after his release from a South African prison and again at Wesleyan University when he played there in 2013. That performance was a revelation, up close and beautiful with a great band and his enormous presence. He told a little joke about being in Zimbabwe with his “old friend” Robert Mugabe, then added, “He stole my cookies.”

There is a lifetime of his good music on record, and your local library will likely have a disc or two: check it out. A great man, a great musician, a great humanitarian and an important voice for freedom, progressive political change and against the poison of racism.

You can see some video of the Wesleyan performance by clicking the image above. All of the songs listed next to it are downloadable with a right click.

December 19, 2017

I Am Brian Wilson

these songs are downloadable with a right click

Don’t Hurt My Little Sister

Fun Fun Fun

Hushabye

Pet Sounds

I Wasn’t Made for These Times

Caroline No

You have to see this as the twin to Mike Love’s autobio, Good Vibrations: I wrote earlier that you were constantly reading between the lines in that book. Brian’s book is exactly the opposite: if anything there is just too much information, Brian is way in touch with his feelings and ready to share. He writes repeatedly about his lifelong struggle with mental illness and is frank about his drug use. I’d had the idea that he was an acid casualty, but he only tripped twice and wrote a lot of California Girls during one of those. He began smoking pot beginning in 1964 (a year he repeatedly refers to as “the year everything happened,” the year the Beach Boys became international stars, had their first number one record, (the year the Beatles broke in America), and the year he had a mental breakdown on a flight from Houston and retired from performing). In the seventies he was fed semi-pro cocktails of psychoactive drugs by his therapist, Eugene Landy while he continued to self-medicate when he could with whatever he could get his hands on, from a four pack a day smoking habit and lots of bevvies to downs, coke and even heroin.

Brian Wilson is not one to push himself forward. “I wasn’t usually the kind of guy who would make a big deal about correcting a misunderstanding. If someone got the wrong idea about me, I might agree with a wrong story just to get out of the conversation.” Shy and sensitive (“The guy in the song sounds like he hasn’t even talked to the surfer girl. He just watches her and thinks about her. That was me. I was kind of shy, and whenever I started talking to a girl she would end up talking to Dennis or Mike instead. They were slicker and more aggressive, and I sort of got moved off to the side to wonder if the girl ever liked me or was interested at all”), but immensely creative (same quote continued: “I felt a little lonely at times, but I also knew that it made for good songs. Loneliness was something that everyone felt but that people were afraid to talk about”), people tried to control him through most of his life: his father, his band, his therapist, his band again, “One of the things I did back then was think about Don’t Hurt My Little Sister all the time. Maybe it’s because it was a song about protection and I felt scared that no one was protecting me.” But the main theme here is his second marriage to Melinda Wilson, better (professional) doctors, a more effective drug regimen and a healthy environment that put him back on his feet. He is relentlessly positive, happy to be writing and performing and seems surprised that people hold him and his work in such high regard. This is nice to see in a superstar.

There are heroes and there are villains: Brian’s abusive and controlling therapist of the seventies and early eighties Eugene Landy comes off really really badly, (only a step above cameo band contact Charles Manson), finally loses his license to practice and fades into a notable obscurity. Dad Murry Wilson terrorizes his sons but also, in Brian’s telling, loves them (unlike Landy), gives them music and, a child of the depression, constantly urges them (often violently) to work harder: ”You have to sing harder,” he said, ”like you care.” ”I’m a genius, too, Brian,” and then not too much later, ““I cannot believe that such a beautiful young boy, who was kind, loving, received good grades in school and had so many versatile talents, could become so obsessed to prove that he was better than his father.” Mike Love….Mike Love. Brian writes, “This Mike, Mike Love, was very friendly and very funny and he made me laugh. I really liked him. We hit it off real well, and soon enough he was almost a fourth brother,” and then “Other guys in the group didn’t like the idea. Mike couldn’t believe it. When he heard the demos he just shook his head and stared at me. The record label wasn’t sure about the album either. Often the record labels agreed with the other guys in the group. The album never came out….” Complicated. The long string of abusive relationships crippled his creative work and raises questions that many many many people on the internet have felt they could answer. I can’t. I’m glad he’s happy, that he’s recording and performing and that people can again enjoy his music.

May 5, 2017

Bruce Hampton

Bruce Hampton died on stage doing an encore at his 70^th Birthday show in the Fox Theater. Writers (who obviously knew very little about him or his music) have been reaching for things to say, mischievous, mystifying (Robert Palmer), unusual, surrealist. Only Ben Ratliff mentioned Dada which for my money is the best way to describe his work. Patriarch of the jam band scene? My memories don’t exactly match that, like Hampton with the Geese Band (Karl Ratzer and Al Nicholson) in the seventies at the Lighthouse on Peachtree just above Tenth, Hampton bolting out the door quick as a squirrel (it was right next to the bandstand)when someone in the audience shot another patron—he’d seen the muzzle flash and was out of there. Or rolling out the slide guitar-mandolin for an extended solo. Or out at Cable Dekalb passing a make-believe roach to some bold fellow trying to interview him. Pity anyone crazy enough to get up on the stage with him, his wit was deadly, he’d learn your laugh the first time he heard it and play it back to you perfectly for as long as you’d stay up there.

Thing about it was, you never ever knew what you were going to get with him: when it was good it was like nothing you’d ever dreamed, when it wasn’t, well, it wasn’t. So what? He never did the same thing twice, he was funny and he was amazing. He could get the craziest people to play together—and he always had great bands: the guitarists he played were always awesome, beginning with the Grease Band’s Howard Kelling and Glen Phillips. It’s sad to see him gone, but as many have said, if it had to be, this is the way he’d have wanted it, on stage, performing a Bobby Bland song with his friends.

Here’s a little taste of some classic work. I don’t have a copy of the Grease Band’s “Music to Eat” Album, so I’ve included a youtube link to Halifax.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVDOZ9IIFIo

Jack the Rabbit, from Strange Voices. This was a standby beginning with the Geese Band in the seventies

The Roof of My Mouth, also from Strange Voices. Get ready for something outstandingly weird.